A Sunset Speaks

Every year towards the end of our time in Maine I start sorting through the nearly one thousand photographs we have taken looking for my favorites. Eventually I will publish my top ten in a future blogpost when I am in a place with sufficiently fast internet. This morning I want to talk about one particular picture that mesmerizes me.

Some nights the lake is too rough, the wind is up and the water is choppy. Occasionally it rains or is totally overcast. But whenever possible, Pam takes her paddle board out somewhere around 7:30 and waits for the celestial show to begin. Sometimes I tag along in my kayak. It’s a difficult business predicting the brilliance of sunsets on this lake. Some nights all the conditions seem perfect but you get nothing. Other nights when you’re not expecting anything special, magic happens. The night that this picture was taken was a night when it could have gone either way. There was a massive dark gray/slate blue cloud hanging over the entire lake except for the edges of the horizon. The sun set at 7:47 that night. Five minutes or so after, we noticed specks of yellow popping up in random spots under the huge oval shaped cloud. Ten minutes later, everything suddenly transformed before our eyes…

As beguiling as this photograph is, it is a pale imitation of the reality of the moment. Neither of us in all our time here had ever seen anything like it. The bright pink and orange highlights of color against the dark canvas of purple with tiny cracks of blue peaking through was breathtaking in real time. It made both of us feel small, very small. It felt like a presence, both beautiful and ominous. We stopped our paddling and watched the evolution of the thing. Eventually it faded away as quickly as it had come…

We come here every summer weighed down by the demands of modern life. Along with everyone else in the world, we carry burdens around. We often attach outsized significance to inconsequential things. It is the way of human beings. We overestimate our importance. We begin to believe that we are much bigger than we are. Then we see something like this and it recalibrates our hearts. There are much bigger things in the world than us and our travails.

It wasn’t the most spectacular sunset, not even close. It was simply unique and it spoke to me uniquely. Let not your heart be troubled. Come to me all you who are heavy laden and I will give you…rest.