This evening I had the privilege of seeing this sunset. Actually, this was just the beginning of it.
To tell the truth, just a while earlier I had walked to a neighbor’s house a block away — my friends JennyGray and Chris and their lovely brood — to sit in their swing to cry. I needed to cry outside of my place of sorrow, and in their garden they have beautiful, broad oaks with generous branches and birdsong, and I sat and I cried and cried. They were not even home, or they were asleep after a long day, but I knew they would welcome my sorrow and cradle it. I cried for the need to be among the trees; for the need to transform and blossom again. For the need for beauty and love and harmony. For the need to be where I want to be. For the need to see something else, other than what I see. I cried for the solitude that I feel in my heart.
And then I began to swing, in the children’s swing, and looking up among the trees I saw the sunset gathering in the west, morphing, as sunsets do, by the second. After taking this picture I felt a need to follow the sunset, to see what would happen to it, this light, as it went where it would go where I could not see from where I sat or rested or stood. And so I got in my car and I drove southwest, chasing it.
I never reached it, as the earth turned before I could salute the sun myself, and wave to it as we turned, but I saw its magnificent transformation of the sky before my eyes the whole way, till it was gone, and it was simply stupendous. From orange to soft pink to lavender and thunderous purple, and then black.
By the time it was all finished and we on this side of earth had veered off, I felt better — my sadness wiped by the beauty. Beauty is essential to my soul. I am glad I went after it, and saw it. Sight, miraculous.