My Rainbow

To the updrafts of chance,
the colors of skyward reach
unfurl like prayer flags
strung between storms and sunlight.

My rainbow has driven its piton
deep into the granite of becoming,
its permanence hanging bright
above the solitary ledge of reward.

How tumultuous the weather
of purposeful quest—
across scree fields that slid away
like promises under careless feet,
up mountains whose jagged shoulders
rose like the vertebrae of sleeping giants.

These crampon-bitten boots
gnawed their way upward,
finding purchase where gravity
kept bargaining for surrender.

The smiles of fulfillment
have been delayed by countless switchbacks,
each bend revealing not relief
but steeper stone ahead.

There were seasons
when fingertip holds were all that remained,
my dreams dangling from the cliff face
like a lone lantern in a canyon of wind.

Safe ascent often became unsafe.

Life's whiteouts were never confined
to snow-choked ridgelines;
they drifted into the heart and mind,
erasing every cairn of certainty.

More than once I stood motionless,
a climber stitched to the mountain by doubt,
while sheer willpower cracked thin as ice
beneath Nature's demand for rest.

Yet every storm was a whetstone.

Every loss sharpened resolve.
Every scar became a contour line
on the map leading upward.

How glorious to stand at last
within my rainbow's cathedral of color,
where the pale wash of first hopes
has deepened into stained-glass fire.

Its arc now spans the valleys below
like a bridge hammered from rain and sunlight,
each hue forged from persistence,
each brilliance earned.

How grateful I have become
for every obstacle placed before me.

For the mountain's purpose was never conquest—
it was instruction.

The rivulets of hardship washed clean
the veneer from ambition,
revealing beneath it
the living bedrock of love, faith, and endurance,

layer upon luminous layer,
a kaleidoscope cut from weather and wonder.

And standing here now,

I remember the child I once was,

running through wet grass,
small hands reaching for a rainbow
that always seemed to move farther away.

Only now do I understand:

the rainbow was never fleeing.

It was growing—

waiting at the summit

until the child who chased it

arrived as the adult

who had earned its colors.