A Rainbow at Milestone 35

On January 1, 2008, five years ago tomorrow, I posted "A(nother) New Year," a short meditation on my 30th birthday and the passage of time. The piece closes with the following paragraph.

"It's a rare, curious thing when one's perception of life transitions from the regular line of past, present, and future to an ambiguous cycle of individual moments. This mode is necessarily fleeting, so difficult is it to reconcile with contemporary life. We flip through scrapbooks and retell stories of our youth; the ball drops, the clock counts down and the crowd's vague, anticipatory energy crescendos; a mark is made, the number changed; the owl falls on the quivering chaff. Ring in the year of the brown rat. I'll also ring in another decade."

This past Saturday, I rang in another half-decade, turning 35. On my 30th birthday, I noted that I was "another year older, but more happy than I've been in years." That was a little over a month before my first date with the beautiful and wonderful woman who, this past November, I married; she is no small part of why my life, five years later, is happier still.

Mission Sunset rainbow;San Francisco, CA; September 2012

Whether the happiness is causative or not, I can't say, but, today, although I remain inspired and moved by subjects that many people shy from (the "deer carcass dumped in a roadside ditch" that I photographed on my 30th birthday, for example), I'm also open to many that I used to deride. And so, as 2012 turns over into 2013, as the black dragon morphs into the water snake, I share with HH readers a rainbow over San Francisco's Mission District.

Happy 2013, folks. May it be a productive and deeply satisfying year.

Image credit: Christopher Reiger, copyright 2012