Why are there so many troubles with rainbows?

Let's get to the other side!

It's Pride weekend in San Francisco, and I’ve been catching rainbows since April Fools Day.

Much to our surprise, we were driving down the 5 on our way to Disneyland that day. A friend had gifted us with tickets he couldn't use, what LUCK! The skies were full of shifting clouds, as uneasy and threatening as the national mood. We’d been listening to road trip playlists, but turned on the radio just in time to hear the end of Senator Cory Booker’s legendary filibuster, a breakthrough moment that felt like the emergence of ALL our voices after the nonstop shock (not awe) of Trump 2.0, DOGE cuts, the whole Trojan Horse of Project 2025. During Booker’s thunderous applause, a rainbow appeared on the horizon.

The Cory Booker Rainbow

Since then, it’s been rainbows galore. I bought a rhinestoned rainbow clutch purse at a thrift shop and some giant acrylic rainbow earrings at a garage sale and my friend got the most amazing shoes. Rainbow is my favorite color. The theme color of my kitchen is “all of them;” we eat on Fiestaware and each cabinet has a different colored glass pull. Throughout the spring, the ribbony graphics of the Uplift Family Upshift and my new playbook emerged against the backdrop of the punishing political weather. I wrote about what the cover of the new Winning Family means to me.

I took that sparkly rainbow purse, anachronistic for a period recreation, to the sublime Art Deco Ball—because I am never not protesting these days. None of us can escape the drumbeats that want DEI to DIE right now, but it’s the worst for rainbow people. A week after the ball, I was invited to dinner with the most superlative of sophisticates, a couple who collects of Art Deco treasures. Their house is a palette of black, white, and gray, but this pair brings an extraordinary amount of dazzle to our community. “Maybe it’s time to leave the country,” one of the husbands said gloomily.

Another queer and super-creative friend, who had decorated the hallways of her apartment far in advance of #pridemonth with an enormous hanging rainbow to declare it a safe space, was also feeling in crisis. I literally sent her the meme that said, “when you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.” I wished I could do more.

At the #NoKings protest, I made my own tank parade… with rainbows.

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My bullet journal has a piece of Ok Go concert confetti taped on one page, and a circle of Randy Rainbow show glitter on another. There were more rainbows on my trip back to my home town to meet a baby and reconnect with a beloved niece. Liminal symbols of hope, second chances.

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All these rainbows have felt like support, like validation for the work I have been stressing out over so thoroughly. Positive parenting is light-bringing, enlightening. In a world seeking to control, contain, and condemn, teaching people to see ourselves and our children as full-spectrum beings feels like God’s work.

The Winning Family paperback is on sale for a few more days…until the end of June.

It has been so stark, this contrast between the darkness and the cheer, and also hopeful to see hardnesses soften, lighten up. Rainbows are present, all the time, hidden inside all white light. No matter how hard the Darkness wants to extinguish this fact, it can’t, because rainbows are reality. We are light, we are color, and diversity is embedded in our country.

Throughout this spring, I’d be laying in bed at night thinking dark thoughts, but suddenly I would feel, or see, there’s no word for this sense, bright sparkles in my brain. Youtube astrologers were saying this was a real thing, that people were feeling this but not talking about it yet, but that we’re all on the brink of a huge evolution. These pinpricks of light are the consciousness that exists in the blackness of the void, which responds to our imagination and desire. It’s like how The Dali Lama’s Cat talks about how when we do a small good deed of, say, making a cup of tea for someone, and as we do it imagine serving tea and enlightenment to all living beings, we we “turbo-charge an act of modest goodwill into an expression of infinite altruism.” Rainbows are good karma. Acts of generosity are good karma. When we see a rainbow it’s not just luck, but it’s a reminder of all the souls who have walked the earth before us and worked to make it a good place, lifting consciousness towards love and ease.

This June, I got to take a ride in a gondola on Lake Merritt, with my own husband who’s home for the summer and has much to write about, himself. A few days later, disgruntled by the post-solstice June Gloom, this pic from ten years ago appeared on his device. Rainbows are refractions, but when they’re also reflections, they’re full-circle something to sing about.

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