I was headed to the bathroom at work a few weeks ago. A late fall afternoon. The sun was flooding through the windows and doors and this stripe of rainbow on the carpet stopped me in my tracks.

Here is the view as I first saw it:

I really had to go, but I was afraid that if I didn’t go back to my office and grab my cell camera, the moment would be missed forever.

So I did, and the moment was captured, and I still made it to the bathroom in time!

I share this with you because it reminded me that acknowledging the beauty around us is nothing more than a choice to see. Whether we decide to capture it digitally or just keep it in our minds’ eye, it’s just about choosing to stop and notice.

Since I started a new job a few months ago, I’ve noticed that I haven’t really been noticing. I’ve been hanging out in my head, distracted, or, maybe looking straight ahead, but forgetting to look up, down, or around.

So I’m really grateful for the appearance of that rainbow on the floor – a place, it occurs to me, that you don’t normally find a rainbow, making it all the more notable, which confirmed for me that the desire to capture beauty is, indeed, always present, it may just be temporarily asleep.

And in other news …

Thrilled that Thread was featured as a new lit pub on the block in New Pages!

Delighted to have my story “The Name You Give Yourself” featured in Story Club Magazine. It’s a story I told back in August, the week I started my new job, a muse on when I first thought of myself as a writer.

Photographs by Ellen Blum Barish. Copyright November 2015.