Do you know how rainbows are made? Sure, most of us remember third-grade science, prisms dancing from a backyard hose. Light plus water equals color.

But let's go deeper on the mysterious rainbow, a phenomenon that has long dazzled the world's greatest minds. From Norse mythmakers to Aristotle, from Descartes to Newton, thinkers have wrestled with the science and spirituality of rainbows, the nature of infinity and intangibility. Cultures around the world still regard rainbows with divine awe, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with fear.

People arguing over rainbows? That's hardly new. While scientists sought to unpack reflection and refraction, poets balked. John Keats thought to explain a rainbow was to kill it, to reduce the mysticism of nature to a dull, common thing. Edgar Allen Poe used rainbows as a symbol of impending ruin. Rainbows have always inspired some level of existential worry.

But as humans spat and spar, as they ban and bar, rainbows soar.

Light moves faster than we can see it. Water droplets slow that light, bending it, breaking it, dispersing it into an illusion our brains perceive as a vibrant tableau. Some scientists have assigned the rainbow a finite order of colors. Others believe there is no limit to what a rainbow can be.

To encounter one feels like a miracle because there's so much working against it. The sun has to be behind you. It has to be shining at a 42-degree angle from the antisolar point, or the shadow of your own head. To see a rainbow, you have to be in precisely the right location at precisely the right time.

But to really see it, you must be open to possibilities beyond yourself, beyond your phone, beyond your steering wheel, beyond the limits of your own experience. You'll realize that no two rainbows are alike, that no rainbow looks the same to everyone. You'll come to believe that is a good thing.

Rainbows burst through all kinds of dark conditions, through sleet, fog, the light of the moon. Even the bleakness of climate change may spur more rainbows — by 2100, researchers think rainbows could appear up to 5% more often. Those rainbows may flee hostile conditions for higher grounds as snowfall warms into rain. They may thrive in unexpected places, acting as a healing balm wiped across the earth's wounds.

No one can catch a rainbow. No one can stop a rainbow, smother a rainbow, erase a rainbow with paint or tar or laws. No greedy person can climb the length of a rainbow to reach a pot of gold. No one can find the end of a rainbow at all, actually, because a rainbow is a circle, a loop, a ream of colors that goes on and on. A rainbow has no end.

Happy Pride.

Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephrhayes on Instagram.

Photo credit: Mateus Campos Felipe at Unsplash