Tag: sunsets

What Color Tonight?

Every year since I started the blog (even for the many years in which I blogged daily), I have taken Easter weekend off from writing. I’ve always considered Easter weekend to be my truest yearly reset button. It makes more sense for the renewal of life to start again, at this spring time of the year. Everything is new and starting fresh and revitalized and hopeful and full of expectation and aspiration. Everything is teeming with life. Springtime is the innocent infancy of another year in our lives.

Our area in the world is known for its beautiful sunsets. Last night, my husband and I, and our dogs, walked down to a local park to watch the sunset. There were more clouds than usual obscuring the sun, but the light rays still shone their ever long bands, into a bluish, yellowish haze. Sometimes the sunset is bright orange and red. Other times it is determinedly yellow until its last final seconds. A woman was watching the sunset with us, and she said that she had to buy more space on her phone, because she has taken so many pictures of the sunsets, on practically a daily basis.

“It’s different every night, isn’t it?” I said to her.

“Yes, and it’s always beautiful.” We both said practically in unison.

This is the case for everything which we do on a regular basis, isn’t it? We think of our everyday experiences and our daily habits as “the usual” or even mundane. We often think of our daily duties, and our traditions and our holidays and our other cyclical, annual experiences as “the same ol’, same old”. And sometimes we sigh with feigned boredom about this fact, but sometimes we also hang on desperately to “the same”, mostly out of fear and a desire to control everything to keep it the same, for reasons of nostalgia and comfort and security. But nothing really ever remains exactly the same. Even us. Especially us. And so, if we are honest and open and big-hearted and compassionate with ourselves, we notice that the “it” of our every single days, is always a little bit different, and yet, it’s always beautiful, in its own singular way.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Soul Sunday

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Good morning. Tranquility. Peacefulness. Wisdom. Acceptance. Deep knowing and appreciation. Awe. Gratefulness. Love. Unrelenting hope. Comfort. Health. Music in your heart. These are the things that I wish for you, on this lovely Sunday morning. Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. Sometimes I write a poem and sometimes I find poems which other writers have written that are just plain magical. Please witness the magic below:

taken in New Mexico
Taken after a big storm in Florida, about a week after the New Mexico sunset

Sky-Blue Pink

“My dad invented a new color for us: sky-blue pink. It’s what he called the blending of day and night in the evening sky. It was his favorite color, and so it’s been mine. ” – Kate Craw

I took the photograph, seen above, while driving home, just me and my husband and my daughter, from taking our youngest son up to his apartment, close to his university, where he will live, with his best friends, while taking his sophomore college classes, online for this semester. We helped him to unpack (as much as he would let us do it). We went to the obligatory grocery store trip, to make sure that our son started the fall schooling season, all stocked up with nourishment (which made us feel better about the ultimate good-bye), and then, we sat in the apartment with our youngest son and one of his friends and our other son, who is a senior at the same university. We ate take-out burgers and cupcakes and we laughed and we lingered until we felt the obvious energetic itching, from all of the boys, for us to leave, and to make our way home, to our own fall schedules and individual lives.

I felt strangely quiet, yet peaceful, on the way home. I knew that this was the right decision for our family, to allow our boys to have a go, at a makeshift try, at a less-than-normal year at college. It makes a mama’s heart happy, to see her children excited, and joyful and bursting at the seams for a little more freedom, a little more independence, and a little more hope – at any age, but especially during these difficult times.

As I stared out of the window, at the beautiful sunset, it felt like the perfect gift from the Universe. The sunset was a lovely closing curtain on what has been one of the strangest, longest, scariest, yet in many ways, most meaningful summers of our lives. This beautiful sunset officially closed out Summer of 2020, for me. I will never forget this summer for the rest of my days. None of us will. But I have a strange inkling that how I am reflecting on all of the events of this past summer now (the long summer that really started for us, in the middle of a shell-shocked spring), will soften and change, as I survive past it and I absorb the lessons that it has brought to me and to our family and to our whole world, for that matter. I have a deep, knowing sense that the jarring events of the summer of 2020 will blend more perfectly with the ultimate destinations of each of our lives, and that this blending will happen in an unusually, entirely unexpected, beautiful way. I think that ultimately I will remember 2020 as a sky-blue pink year – a year that was more beautiful than I initially thought that it was, mostly because it was so vivid, and jarring, and colorful, and unexpected and memorable. It will be a year that reminded me and my family and my friends and all of us, about the fragility (and therefore, the breath-taking preciousness) of the gift of living a life. If there was ever a year that made us soak in the individual quiet moments, 2020 would be it. If there was ever a year that asked us to reflect, 2020 would be it. If there was ever a year that made us give up the idea that we had all or any of “the answers”, 2020 would be it. If there was ever a year that asked us to just sit still and to breathe in a sky-blue pink sunset, 2020 would be it. And in some crazy, weird way, I think that I am grateful for it. Only time will tell.