Anyone who knows me or follows me on Facebook or Instagram is familiar with my love of sunsets. I post loads of photos of the show on display as days end, each new, all different and spectacular in their own way and worthy of attempts to capture at least a fraction of the show.
“When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” ~ Carl R. Rogers
I doubt there are many people who can have such a display in front of them without it triggering that awe and the deep thoughts that should, by rights, follow the experience of the sky sharing its glory with us puny humans. Dropping into the horizon, we become acutely aware of the Earth’s rotation and can be dizzied by how fast we’re spinning. The changing shapes of clouds prompt notions of animals, faces … and the occasional Starship Enterprise … to pop into mind, stirring imagination and rumination. Colors shift constantly and dramatically, often fleetingly causing wonder if this shade or that hue has ever before been noticed.
I can easily understand the compulsion of the ancients to come up with wacky theories about the why and wherefore of the setting sun: a god driving a golden chariot across the sky daily; Navajo people of the American Southwest portray their sun god as a worker named Jóhonaa’éí, or sun bearer. Every day Jóhonaa’éí laboriously hauls the sun across the sky on his back; myths of monsters or evil spirits that steal or devour the sun or stories of the sun falling from the heavens or withdrawing its light for a time. How else to explain something so huge, so life-impacting, so spectacular at a time next-to-nothing was known?
It’s with emphasis on the spectacular that I am confused, disappointed and outraged by the fact that people in 2015 continue to chalk up this marvelous daily spectacle to mundane, simplistic and tattered ideas trotted out 2000 years ago by illiterates. They’re missing out on so much.
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn’t prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary. ~ STEPHEN HAWKING
That we live on a planet with water and atmosphere enough to create a sunset is wonder enough for anyone … or should be. We revolve around our sun and rotate on our axis, so planning for sunset appreciation is easy. What could possibly motivate so many to opt out of the amazement the natural world provides in favor of acceptance of the moves of some cheesy magician trick? “Watch me pull a rabbit/sunset/rainbow/whatever out of my hat … or ass …”
How believers cheat themselves out of true appreciation for the world around us! Dodging knowledge, learning, thought, wonder, for the sake of convenient indolence is an offense to humanity and our struggle to reach personal pinnacles of fascination and surprise during our lifetimes, and how can that struggle not be better than the shoulder shrug that is “God did it.”?
It may be — I hope it is — redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable. ~ WILLIAM GOLDING
A collection of my short stories:
I'm in this one, too ...
And I'm in here, as well ...
Paradise Preoccupied 