I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slow Down.

Last October, driving north on Interstate 89, my wife, D.D. was behind the wheel.

I was in the passenger seat, commenting on the vibrant red and orange leaves of the maples

and oaks.

Vermont was in the throes of one of its famed leaf peeping seasons, a phrase that always

has me chuckle a bit.

On its descent below the horizon, the autumnal sun peaked in and out of passing trees.

Above us, in the sky was this blazing fragment of a rainbow, a massive prism of color framed

by surrounding clouds.

I was startled, seeing it a second later, D.D. audibly gasped.

Where I living in centuries past, I might have read the image in the sky as some sort of

wizardry, some magic, or sign, engineered and visited upon us by some divine spirit.

However, living in the 21st century, of course, I almost reached for my phone to Google.

But you know what, I stopped short and just let myself marvel.

We both simply gazed up, mouths agate, speechless.

Isn't it a pleasure sometimes to simply live in the ineffable?

I have noticed lately that, running to retrieve my phone to source answers, short circuits

one of my favorite feelings in life, the evocative experience of being odd, encountering something

vast and grand.

I looked at D.D. and she looked back at me, and in that moment, the magic of sunlight

refracting ice crystals in the atmosphere mediated something deeper.

We bore witness to each other's reactions to the sublime, and took in the fullness of

...