Kaleidoscopes. Remember them? Those geometric spinning fragments posing in rapidly shifting flash points of coordinated color and chaos?

Sliced beauty with sharp, precise edges. Jangled and jarred gemstones, clicking into view.

Suddenly you see…

Jewels tumbling from a pirate’s upturned chest.

Dragon’s scales shifting in flight.

A flamenco dancer’s swirling skirt.

A Spanish shawl.

A thousand butterflies having sex.

A million flowers spilling seeds.

Blood blooms. Light bursts. Magic is born.

All at the flick of a wrist.

It all feels slightly pornographic and oh-so-beautiful.

I can’t help but be reminded of life. The creation of life, sure, in the flick of the wrist, the spilling of blood and seed, absolutely. As the cylinder twists in the slimmest of fractions, new magic appears. in glorious technicolor.

But also in the biting, sharp edges, cutting almost constantly, spinning almost endlessly, into gravity-defying, rotating cartwheels of color.

We can choose to see life as broken shards of complete calamity and chaos in ever-widening, gravity-grinding, beyond-our-control tumbling. Nothing more than flotsam and jetsam crashing inside an unrelenting tidal wave. (It certainly felt like it this week, what with all the stomach bugs and travel woes and deep-seated cavities of the physical and metaphorical kind.)

Or we can choose to see ourselves and our lives as prisms of dancing light, beautiful and gleaming, made all the more so when we’re bumping and rolling up against other jangled and jagged prisms. Again, slightly pornographic, but I didn’t mean for it to be this time. Or maybe I did. Because that’s for sure beautiful, too. And the absolute quintessence of life.

For me, I choose prisms of dancing light.

I like to see us all as slivers of sapphire and ruby, gold and obsidian, emerald and opal and more. Succulent suds of shimmer and shine, made exquisite when randomly and richly tossed by the universe into predestined patterns, made richer with family and friends and even complete strangers knocking up against us in richly syncopated design.

Our lives are what we (and our maker, with a flick of the wrist) makes them. You see what you choose to see. You be who you choose to be.

Tumbling jewels, coupling butterflies, phosphorous flotsam.

You decide.

Me? I choose gemstones and swallowtails, tumbling and tossed. In this randomly rotating gyre, my kaleidoscope blooms beauty and light.