I’m sitting on the meadow, on top of the small, green hill. I was setting-up my tent, but the sudden silence in the air made me stop and sit on the grass. Everything around me started turning into dark shapes against the green, turquoise sky. A small, barely visible crest of the young Moon rose up, just above the horizon. the Sun was long gone, but its traces were still painting the sky in that wonderful, sunset mixtures of colours impossible to reproduce to capture in any way. The colour of the sunset sky is much more than just about the sky itself. It is about the stillness in the air, the soft, tender breeze; muted sounds in the distance and that inevitable feeling that another day is passing by. It might have been a great day, full of joy and things we love. We might have spent that day in our favourite city, on top of our favourite mountain or in the arms of the loved one.
It could have been a hard day, God knows life offers plenty of those too. Work, people, deadlines and everyday struggle. We might have had the worst day ever.
It doesn’t really matter. Sunsets don’t judge, or promise anything. Sunsets just are. Just like lighthouses help you see your way through the sea, rough or calm, sunsets show you in a very peaceful, but clear way, that life is passing by, that days are rolling from one into another, that things do change. They are not here to promise you more good days or the end of the bad ones. They don’t indicate the end or the beginnings. They are the guardian in the middle, a silent, beautiful warning that all things have their place, their time and their demise, and we’re a part of it all. Life may or not be eternal, it doesn’t matter. This body has its expiry date. This particular life has its purpose and it will end, regardless of whether it was fulfilled or not. It is up to us to recognize that.
That’s how I see sunsets when I look through their surface beauty. There are many such warnings and reminders weaved through the very fabric of Nature, but sunsets are the most powerful one. The force that stops the day for the night to play its part, designed with such attention to details, shapes and colour I have no choice but to wonder about its maker. And mine.
As the first stars started appearing, and the night’s blanket covered the turquoise with dark, navy blue that suited it better, I smiled, suddenly feeling so small amidst all that empty space above me, the amount of which was beyond even my imagination. Billions upon billions of stars, billions upon billions light years across everywhere, and I lucky enough to catch a glimpse of their light on their way to infinity.
What is it about sunsets that make me feel this way. The calm outside somehow creeps in as well, prepares me for the glory of the night sky, clears my mind of all the thought but those focused inward, as if those two spaces, the inner, deep one and the outer, vast one are somehow intertwined and connected more than I imagine.
Night would still be glorious and powerful, but it’s the sunset that makes it much more than that. An epic introduction that somehow manages to steal the show, sunsets linger in my mind long after the night arrives.
Another day passed by for me, another one is starting for someone else, somewhere else.
And nothing will ever be exactly the same ever again.
.