Shifting Sunsets

 

When I think about or take in a sunset, I’m often dazzled by the surprising array of colors splashed across the sky. As a kid, I remember seeing paintings of sunsets & thinking that the amazing spectrum of colors that were used were more of human imagination than of reality. I mean, those bright yellows & neon oranges, even hot pinks, how could those really appear as vibrant in the sky? Like the adage, “life is often stranger than fiction,” so too my mind rejected what I thought was beyond reasoning. Perhaps the fact that I lived in an artist’s colony as a child affected my sensibilities? I’d see so much color in the paintings exhibited on Bearskin Neck that my mind rejected those seemingly garish hues. Even though I only lived in Rockport for two years, those two years have affected my imagination ever since living there. That’s why I keep making my annual visits.

Watching the sun set over the ocean horizon, I’d learn that no two sunsets appeared the same. Each seemed unique in its own way.

Since moving to Utah, I’ve noticed that these spectacular sunsets over the Salt Lake Valley dazzle the viewer. I mean, I had always associated certain vibrant colors with the West–most likely due to the pictures & movies I’d seen from classic movies of John Wayne & Robert Redford or any of the many, many 70s westerns my father would watch. He loved movies like “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly,” “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” “Three Mules for Sister Sara,” & “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.” Yet, those films seemed to have faded colors. I’d wonder why it always appeared so bright during those “night” scenes, wondering how the moon provided so much visibility? Sad to say it took me until adulthood to realize those shots were taken during the day with a filter applied to make it seem like night. Sunset colors only really appeared at the ends of these kinds of movies, usually with a silhouette of a rider on a horse foregrounded & vanishing into that horizon. And then there were those ubiquitous Marlboro Man cigarette ads which added to the mythos of the West & its accompanying palette.

The colors that surfaced to mind would be associated with bright flames–intense oranges, reds, & yellows. But then there were those expanded desert colors of purples & blues which offset those intense oranges, reds, & yellows.

Gazing at sunsets isn’t something new to me, but I suppose I’m making more space in my life for allowing that gazing. Even in reflection writing here, I’m able to revisit those moments captured in these images, & experiencing those moments again offers a sense of wonder & even curiosity. Part of me wonders about light wave frequencies & how visible light hits the eye in order to create color. Another part of me wonders about space & the atmosphere & interconnection. The latter can send me into deep introspection, thinking about existence, life, consciousness. To think that physics actually makes time travel possible, even if on the minutest of scales, is a crazy thing to accept. Yet, long ago, we didn’t know that energy traveling through wires could send a person’s voice around the world or allow two people in entirely different places to see & talk to each other in real time. If people 300 years ago saw the devices that could perform these feats, they likely would call it witchcraft or heresy, unable to understand how such technology worked.

So, too, we don’t know what we don’t know in this moment. In the future, science & new tech tools will make even more incredible things possible, things that we now would disbelieve if we lacked the understanding of how they worked.

Looking at the horizon & up at the sky, we can be reminded of how tiny & insignificant we are, how little we actually know, & how what we may dream up could become realities in the future. Great distances seem symbolic. And these are the weird places my mind travels to when lost in contemplation. I start to probe possibilities in my mind, looking up at the moon & stars & even the sun when it rises & sets. These celestial bodies remind me of the great expanse beyond what we can see with the naked eye. When we see stars or the sun or the moon, we see the light, not so much the details of burning gases & floating rocks or particles. I recently started watching the new BBC version of Pullman’s His Dark Materials, & I think of the dust that settles on those with mature consciousness, reinforcing a sense of self tied to something bigger, almost like The Force in Star Wars.

These signs & symbols persist in human history & existence for a reason, in many incarnations & differing versions based on the culture & belief system. There must be a reason why. Shifting sunsets, like shifting sands in an hourglass, remind us how things can change so dramatically but yet still be connected through a sense of sameness.

4 thoughts on “Shifting Sunsets

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *