Sunrise, Sunset

    My friend suggested this post, perhaps to get me to quit sending him photos of the quickening sunset I was observing.  My comments ranged from a basic appreciation of the beauty to "...entering Oz country now" as the colors darkened and grew ever more vivid.  It's something that we've all treasured at some point, a particularly dazzling orange or sky-filling sunset capturing our attention and making us pause for a few seconds from our standard take-it-for-granted attitude.  Sometimes this occurs when we're on vacation, the tourist aspect making the everyday occurrance extra special (say on a boat or cliffside, or a destination such as the Haleakala Crater on the island of Maui where tours drive paying spectators up to the rim in the darkness before dawn).

My wife trying to "capture" one of the many desert sunsets.

    Of course, this viewing the sun rising is just a matter of perspective as the late Carl Sagan so frustratingly tried to point out, that the sun is not rising and setting but it's our earth rotating (a thought first brought to our attention by Copernicus).  The giant orb we call our planet is spinning and these comings and goings of light from the sun shows that with great precision.  Viewed that way (that of imagining our planet in rotation), you can grasp how the larger the mass the slower it appears to move because on average, you're watching all of this from a spot that is moving at over 1000 miles per hour (+1600 km) says Universe Today.  Add to all of this the closeness of our planet.  Move closer to farther away and our sunrises and sunset would appear quite different.

Sunset as viewed from Mars (photo from Wikipedia commons)

 
    And there's more, from air dispersal to water molecules (think wind and clouds and things like volcanic eruptions and pollution), and our grammatical history of the word which Wikipedia briefly explained as: ...The English words "orient" and "occident", meaning "east" and "west", respectively, are descended from Latin words meaning "sunrise" and "sunset".  The word "levant", related e.g. to French "(se) lever" meaning "lift" or "rise" (and also to English "elevate"), is also used to describe the east.  In Polish, the word for east wschód (vskhud), is derived from the morpheme "ws" – meaning "up", and "chód" – signifying "move" (from the verb chodzić – meaning "walk, move"), due to the act of the Sun coming up from behind the horizon.  But viewed another way, we have turned our life cycle into such terms, our prime years of virtually unlimited daylight soon leading to our "sunset" years.  This was captured in one of the popular songs from the play/movie Fiddler On the Roof: ...Is this the little girl I carried?  Is this the little boy at play?  I don't remember growing older, when did they?  Sunrise, sunset, swiftly flow the days.  Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers, blossoming even as we gaze.  

Sunset from a parking lot in Sedona, Arizona

    I think of my mother (and soon, myself) when I picture sunsets, not only for their beauty but for those waning years.  Often, as she plays with the elevator security keypad in the "locked-down" memory care facility she's staying at (she's successfully gotten onto the elevator twice), she tells me about feeling like "a prisoner."  And more and more, I can relate to her feelings.  For her, even with a limited view from her room and an open-windowed dining area, there really are no vast skies and stunning sunsets.  Our journeys out together are often in the daytime, followed by a return to a brightly lit hallway and bedroom, all to help ensure that she can "see" clearly and not trip or fall on something.  But there are no more sunsets.  Only the room slowly brightening with the morning hours and then later, lights out.  A prisoner.  

    As with those lyrics from the song, time passes quickly (additional lyrics from the song say "When did she get to be a beauty, when did he get to be so tall?  Wasn't it yesterday when they were small?")  Indeed, we can all look back and suddenly last week seems to have already gone by.  Same with last month.  November already...and soon the holidays.  Already?  As we all age, this is inevitable but not regrettable.  Those of us fortunate to still be gazing back at the past are the lucky ones.  But even luckier are those of us able to look outside and view the stars, to view life, and to view the sunsets...every single day.  It's not a question of how many we have missed, but rather how many we may continue to miss; perhaps that time of realization will come only when we become a "prisoner," a captive of a body too old to see or to old to make it too the window.  Perhaps we should step outside now, while we can, and soak in the new painting happening each evening in the sky...beautiful stuff, and free.  But only to those who look...