The Setting -- and Settling Berclair Sun

The Setting -- and Settling Berclair Sun, a photo by Taproot Garden on Flickr.

The sun doesn't set in Iowa; at least not in our part of it -- not like this. Yes, the day comes to an end; yes, the sun goes away. Night eventually envelopes us. But there is no “sunset” on this scale. Perhaps it is the trees that veil the view. Perhaps it is the rolling topography that interrupts the horizon. In the city, to be sure, there are all the buildings reaching up like fingers in front of a baby’s eyes, curtaining everything on the other side.

Or it could, of course, be that the problem is less “Iowa” and more “home” wherever that may be -- home, where we are busy, moving to and fro; indoors and preoccupied with our weariness alongside we have or have not accomplished and all that needs to be done.

It's too bad. There is something almost medicinal about the setting sun -- meditative, I suspect, even for the non-spiritual. That settling fire becomes a vortex, hypnotically focusing and drawing all it touches into its own mellowing transformation from hot yellow to warm orange to confectioner’s striations of pink and lavender and mauve. Before we are even aware of it we, too, have settled. And with that, it's work somehow complete, it drops below the horizon, out of sight as in an instant, until tomorrow’s rising -- somehow knowing, I suppose, that its work is never done.

It will be hard to leave this evening ritual -- drifting out to the circled chairs under the trees out back, taking our places on the east side of the arc, instinctually facing west; offering ourselves, as it were, into the dusky ministrations of God’s first creation.

And being somehow recreated, ourselves.