An orange blaze moves across the horizon. Lines of clouds, previously white and grey, morph into red hot lava flowing across the Berkshire hills. It’s another day and another glorious sunset, and yet again I am captured by the wonder of this place I call home.
The sun is setting. It’s not a metaphor. It’s not the end of a life, or a career, or anything having to do with a slow decline leading to finality.
It’s a burning fire, the hotter than hot heat, and it’s real. It’s a star, 93 million miles from where I sit on my deck searching for satellites late at night. It’s the subject of life and beauty and art and song and so much more for the billions of people who depend on its warmth, its glow, its ability to move our hearts from melancholy to joyful.
I chase the sun as it mysteriously it rises and sets. In reality it does neither. The sunrise and the sunset are a phenomenon caused by the rotation of the Earth.
In the universe, there is not up or down — only spinning, only revolution. Gravity works in circles. The sun also spins, but from where we sit it’s impossible to observe, glancing at its splendor.
And, like the Earth and the entire solar system, it too revolves around the center of the Milky Way. I rush to see the glow of the sun in places where the continents touch the sea. Mile-long streaks of red, yellow and orange dance across the water as if they are a painting in progress, gently changing with each stroke, until finally – majestically – the ca.