Parhelion

Today, the cornflower blue sky is only interrupted by a few thin cirrus clouds. Variegated hues emanate from one gauzy wisp of vapor like streaks of subtle rainbow colors painted by a passing sky artist. The vibrant display on an azure field evokes my wonder, and I feel like dancing. I bounce up and down, step back and forth, with my knees acting as springs, until my aging joints start to creak. My craning neck also gets a bit stiff from looking skyward, but I stare until the rainbow starts to fade.

The common name for this radiant atmospheric event is “sun dog”—a rather odd designation for something so lovely. So, here’s the science. A sun dog appears as a little rainbow in fair weather, twenty-two degrees away from the sun. The phenomenon looks like it is following or “dogging” the day star, sometimes looking like a halo. The technical term is parhelion (“next to the sun”), and it is created by light refracting through ice crystals in cirrus or stratocirrus clouds. I think the word parhelion is a sonorous, poetic description of the event. Occasionally, science comes up with a good name.

I continue to walk home and notice the parhelion still appears from my viewpoint in our backyard. Maybe the rainbow is also dogging me. My ancient self senses a miracle, an auspicious sign indicating something I have forgotten. I wish my genetics hadn’t wandered so far away from the dawn of human sky-gazing, but I seem to be recalling some echoes of that existence. Aldous Huxley wrote, “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” A miracle invites us to live in between.

I think back to the time I was hiking with Lama Rinchen in the meadow below Broken Top mountain when he asked me a curious question, “Does the weather change when you clap your hands?” I thought for a moment, recalling when I experienced a quick shift of weather in the high mountains. One moment, a clear sky, and then for no apparent reason, clouds, wind, and rain miraculously appeared in the span of a short few minutes. So, I answered the question, “Of course!” There was no reason to believe otherwise.

Lama Rinchen still has memories of the Tibetan high plateau encoded in his genes; his younger eyes looked up, influenced by centuries of indigenous stories and wisdom. Although his older self now resides at a lower elevation in Kathmandu, the remembrance remains. Maybe I have a memory from another place and time that tells a symbolic story of the parhelion. It is not a conceptual idea, but rather an ancient echo becoming louder, calling to me, inviting me to remember something that has never completely departed from the deep recesses of my psyche. Somewhere in between…