Mark Stafne, my nephew, really took this picture looking from Westcove to the Ring of Berea. Given the nature of “Irish” weather—rain, fog, clouds, sun, more rain, fog, clouds and sun—this is not an unusual sight. So I started thinking about how the rainbow, given its frequency, became the symbol of Irish myth, of small people and pots of gold. In fact, it’s at the end of the rainbow that we all wish we were at.
If you say something is at “the end of the rainbow,” you mean it is something that you would very much like to get or achieve, although in reality this will be very difficult. Like having your business survive on sales revenue that dropped 60% in 2020.
There is the old legend that says a pot of gold is buried at the point where the rainbow meets the ground. Since a rainbow is an optical illusion, and will look different depending on where one is viewing it from, there is no point at which a rainbow actually meets the earth, rendering such rewards an impossibility. The end of this Pandemic is still a rainbow that eluded us.
The spirit that allows us to believe in the power of rainbows must be what has kept me and others like me moving forward, expecting that if we just kept going, we might get to the end of the rainbow—the end of the pandemic in Castlecove and everywhere else in the world and for this to be more than a fantasy, illusion or pipe dream. On the one hand, death continues to stalk us. More than 755,000 persons have died of COVID in the US as of this date, mid November, 2021. In Ireland, just under 5,500 persons have died. Seventy percent of Ireland’s population have been fully vaccinated. To eat inside a restaurant in Dublin, we have to show a vaccination card when we are there in early October, 2021. Every Irish person we met was testing themselves regularly.
If we don’t realize we are one world community that will continue the spread of more variants without a world wide response, we will add exponentially to the spread of this disease.
In the beginning, I became determined to keep Imagine going, despite tremendous challenges. Good friends like Vanessa Moore at Unwinded, Maribeth at Maribeth Bakery, Rais Mugloo at Indus Imports and many others agree on this. It was the most difficult thing any of us had ever faced. And while we had all worked hard all our lives, nothing was as hard as this. Many businesses that look like ours have failed.
Next, My Gratitude Journal.