At the end of the rainbow (Stop searching for what can't be found)

At least every Irish person thinks that they know what's hidden at the end of a rainbow.  Common folklore strangely never seems to specify at which end of the rainbow that pot of gold is to be found. After all, most rainbows seem to have TWO ends.

It also seems telling that it's not love and happiness that are to be found there, but only money, which in western culture these days seems to serve as the universal Ersatz for the real thing.

But hey, I'll take money if I find it. I'm not sure it can generate happiness, but it definitely can reduce some pain.

A couple of days ago I felt that it was my duty to hand out 4 5$ bills to the first four homeless people I saw.  I was riding a bicycle at the time, which made this task much more feasible than driving a car.  The homeless are pretty much invisible and untouchable from a car, maybe that is the reason so many people prefer driving in them.

I digress. I was talking about the rainbow.  It was a real thing of beauty. I was standing there on the Southern viewpoint of Lion's Gate Bridge and I was laughing out loud.  

90% of the reason for laughing was pure joy because the thing was SO BEAUTIFUL.  And that's hard to find in Vancouver's artificial concrete landscape.

So, on the bicycle I found 3 people easily on Davie Street before I took the route through the park back to North Vancouver.  
The hand of an older alcoholic man reached out into the air as soon as he spotted the bill as if he was afraid it was a beautiful  butterfly that could evade his reach any moment.  What do people give to the homeless?  Nickels and dimes? This blue bird did not fly away.

A younger guy a block away exclaimed "oh my God" or something similar at the sight of the bill. A kind of absolute amazement that other people might show at the sight of a $1000 bill.  And I'm wondering again what the crowd that pay close to $5 on a Starbucks coffee or howevermuch on bad expensive food in this city has left over for the homeless and needy.  Not much apparently.  

In all my 50 years I have never seen a rainbow like this.  It looked so defined, so bright, so SOLID.

I wasn't the least concerned with hunting down mystical treasure at its ends. I was just enjoying its tremendous beauty.  

In a city where both the climate and the people are cold, it managed to warm my heart and soul, just like seeing the faces of the poor and seeing that I made a tiny little difference to their lives today. That's a very powerful thing, that feeling that you have improved someone's life, even if it's just a tiny bit.  So if you're driving around in a car or have developed that very common eye disease that makes the poor invisible to you, I can only say "Try it, you might like it".

Oh right, the rainbow's end.  Did I ever find it?  Nope.  And that was the other end of my amusement on that bridge.  All that greed hunting for pots of gold?  That's human lifetime almost as wasted as watching TV.  The rainbow didn't have an end.  It was forming a perfect circle around Lion's Gate Bridge, coming down on the sides and below the bridge continuing to the other side to meet it's other end,

So Good Luck to all the fools that look for life's riches in the wrong spot and in the wrong category.