My son returned from a road trip where he captured beauty from mountains to ocean. The thing that captured my attention and heart when viewing his photos on the big screen was the sunsets. Ok full disclosure sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a sunrise and a sunset in photos! But…the beauty, the timeless awe of the palate of mother nature painting the sky in her unique way.
What is it that most of us find so awe inspiring about these fleeting and magical moments of the day? For me I think a big part of it is the ritual. The brightening or darkening of the world that marks the beginning of the day filled with possibility and the end of the day perhaps evoking a time of reflection or gratitude. The reminder that the sun will rise and fall again and again, marks our days with a sense of promise and grace.

My other son would head out to the dock at our lake at the exact time for sunset every night to witness mother natures display. We just moved to this sweet little house on a lake a year ago but he has observed how the sun sets a bit further east every night. So now the sun setting into the water is out of our vision not to return until April. Amazing the intricacies of observing nature and getting drawn into her rituals. I think this may be a lost practice as more and more people lose touch with nature almost completely. We grow more modern turning our gaze away from these beautiful and honestly reassuring and grounding cycles of nature.

Recently, I grew enamored with a seemingly depressing book of the bible, Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes, one of the wisdom books, the author King Solomon speaks of the mundaneness of the world, the vanity ( oh yes modern man has remembered this!), all the toil, and for what? Just toil as we march toward death. Wow, depressing for sure, but don’t we all feel this way at times? The author frequently says there is nothing new under the sun.

As the book comes to a close, we see King Solomon change gears. As he muses that we will never have all the answers to life, death and beyond, we should enjoy what we have. While there may be nothing new under the sun and humanity has shared patterns and problems for many, many generations, there is the flip side to our problems, and this is acceptance, gratitude, enjoyment and dare we say joy in every good thing given under the sun by a loving God. “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end”- Ecclesiastes. 3: 11

He has set eternity in the human heart! Just maybe that is why we are awe struck by the rising and setting sun. As we gaze out over the landscape, we see beyond ourselves, beyond all the toil under the sun and we see with eyes of wonder that which we cannot hold or grasp. We see the beauty of the shifting of colors in the expansive sky as we too entertain the idea of expansiveness within ourselves. In the ritual, in the mundane, the smallness of our day to day. There is a timelessness. There is eternity in the paintbrush strokes across the sky. There is eternity in our hearts. I encourage you to look and see and to enjoy these rituals of mother nature. I think King Solomon would wish that for us, as an antidote to the mundaneness of life.

On this day as the cycle of day begins, I choose to be in this world but not truly of this world and to remember and honor the cycles of nature. I aim to remember and honor the one that lights the sky and paints in colors and textures sometimes beyond understanding. I choose to care for myself so that I might cast a brighter hue in the world, ultimately this is all we can truly control. I close with my favorite quote from Clarissa Pinkola Estes which always grounds me and reminds me of my intention and my role in this life, day by day.

One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair – thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

…One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.

The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires … causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both — are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

I attest this is a long quote but sometimes my words pale to those that have gone before me and they must be shared, just like the flare, the signal fire, the display of the soul. Let us honor the display of mother nature, the rising and setting of the sun to mark our days and to help us to look within and upward to see the light and then to share it.