The sunsets right now seem like they’re apologizing for the rest of the year. They are totally glorious—pink and orange, purple and gold. The sky seems to hollow out and give me extra room to breathe. Even tonight, when the sunset is bands of whites and grays, there is something that seems different about it then during the rest of the year.
In the winter, the low angle of the sun stretches out the sunset, giving us more time to watch the light linger on the cloudscape. This more leisurely change of light, along with generally drier air and fewer particles in the atmosphere, as NOAA meteorologist Stephen Corfidi told Vox last year, gives this season its striking sunsets.
The shorter days, too, have given me the chance to see the sun’s arrival and departure. It rises right now just around seven in the morning, and sets before five, hours where it’s easy for me to be awake and looking at the sky. Elsewhere, the days are even shorter, with even fewer hours in between the beginning of the light and the end.
Now the sunrise and sunset feel more like bookends to the day than in other seasons. Maybe because the hours in between feel like something to be survived, sometimes. Maybe because I never know what each new day will bring—not that I ever did, but I thought I did.
Starting and ending each day with the sun reminds me of another of my current obsessions, poet Pádraig Ó Tuama and his Poetry Unbound podcast. At the beginning of the podcast, he reads a poem. Then he spends some time discussing the poem. And then, at the end, he reads it again.
It’s not the same recording of the poem, played twice. It’s the same poem, the same voice, but different. There are always subtle differences in how Ó Tuama reads the poem the second time. I hear it differently, too. I hear it after learning more about the poet, about their background, about what they might be aiming toward. I hear it after hearing Ó Tuama’s music—I meant to write “musings” right then, but the spell-check had other, better ideas—about what the poem might mean to him, to others, in the context of the world and of the room where I sit. The poem is something else now, on the second reading. It means more, it feels more familiar, more comfortable and also more immense.
And so, too, with the sunset. Ever since dawn, the day has been unfolding. Whatever news has already come, the meals have been made, the school Zooms have started and ended, the daily email from the public health department has arrived. This changing of the light means more now that the day has finished speaking, now that I can start to think about what it said.
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Image by Pedro Szekeley, via Flickr/Creative Commons license
I delight in the thought of an “unfolding”. A poem first read once “sounds” different when read again after reflection. Same, too, with sunsets viewed at one time, compared to another time. Before I begin my late Fall/Early Winder nightly walk with my dog, even before I put on a coat or attach the dog leash, I wonder what my favorite “star patch”…the Pleiades…will look like, reveal to me, as part of my walk. My experience of looking up as soon as I exit my house, even if there is cloud cover, is always different from my experience of looking up the last time before re-entering my house. A blessing always unfolds from start to finish, always renewed again the next night.
Dear David, how lovely! I will look at the Pleiades and think of your walk unfolding tonight. Thank you!