"Sunset at Rockaway Beach" (Text & Image Copright Wylddane Productions, LLC)
"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming..."
~John Muir
This morning the coffee tastes especially rich.
Outside my window, the birds have already begun their morning chorus. The fountain in the garden burbles with its familiar music, and the gentle air drifting through the open window carries the promise of another mild summer day. Dawn has quietly unfolded across the northwoods while I sit here, hands wrapped around a warm mug, watching the light slowly find the world once again.
Yet my thoughts are not entirely here.
Yesterday evening, at precisely 6:11, a dear friend slipped beyond my sight.
It is a strange thing to awaken into a sunrise while carrying the memory of someone else's sunset.
Perhaps that is why this old photograph came to mind.
I took it years ago at Rockaway Beach in Pacifica on New Year's Day. The sun was sinking beyond the Pacific, bathing the cliffs and water in gold before quietly disappearing beneath the horizon. Standing there, I remember feeling both sadness and wonder. It looked like an ending.
But it never truly was.
At that exact moment, somewhere beyond that horizon, another shoreline was awakening. Somewhere children were rubbing sleep from their eyes. Somewhere fishermen were preparing their boats. Somewhere another soul was stepping outside to greet the first light of a brand-new day.
The earth had not lost the sun.
It had simply turned.
Perhaps life is more like that than we realize.
We often think in absolutes. We speak of beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, births and deaths. Yet nature whispers a gentler truth. The seasons never stop; they simply change places. The tide that leaves one shore is already returning to another. Sunset and sunrise are not opposites. They are companions, occurring together in the same eternal moment, depending only upon where we stand.
Maybe our lives are like that as well.
Childhood gives way to adulthood, not because one has vanished, but because another season has quietly arrived. Careers end so new purposes may begin. Relationships change their form but often leave love itself untouched. Even grief, painful though it is, slowly becomes gratitude wearing quieter clothes.
And perhaps death itself belongs to that same mystery.
James Dillet Freeman expressed it more beautifully than I ever could:
She has put on invisibility...
I do not doubt that You are there as here,
And You will hold her dear.
Then comes the line that has remained in my heart ever since I first read it:
"...she will find it is not death but dawn."
None of us can say with certainty what lies beyond the horizon of this life. Every faith, every philosophy, every hopeful heart reaches toward that mystery with different words.
But I have always found comfort in this image: the sun never dies. It only passes beyond our sight.
Perhaps love does something very much the same.
This morning, as I sip this second cup of coffee and listen to the birds greeting a world made new, I realize that grief and gratitude can sit together quite peacefully. One reminds us that someone is absent from our eyes. The other reminds us that they remain present in our hearts.
The light they gave us does not disappear.
It continues traveling through everyone whose life they touched.
So if today finds you saying goodbye—to a loved one, to a season of life, to a dream that has run its course—remember the lesson of the sun.
What looks like sunset from where you stand may, beyond your sight, already be someone else's dawn.
Perhaps that is the deepest hope we are given: that love, like light, is never destroyed.
It simply changes its perspective.
And somewhere, just beyond the horizon we cannot yet see, morning is already breaking.
~Wylddane
~John Muir
This morning the coffee tastes especially rich.
Outside my window, the birds have already begun their morning chorus. The fountain in the garden burbles with its familiar music, and the gentle air drifting through the open window carries the promise of another mild summer day. Dawn has quietly unfolded across the northwoods while I sit here, hands wrapped around a warm mug, watching the light slowly find the world once again.
Yet my thoughts are not entirely here.
Yesterday evening, at precisely 6:11, a dear friend slipped beyond my sight.
It is a strange thing to awaken into a sunrise while carrying the memory of someone else's sunset.
Perhaps that is why this old photograph came to mind.
I took it years ago at Rockaway Beach in Pacifica on New Year's Day. The sun was sinking beyond the Pacific, bathing the cliffs and water in gold before quietly disappearing beneath the horizon. Standing there, I remember feeling both sadness and wonder. It looked like an ending.
But it never truly was.
At that exact moment, somewhere beyond that horizon, another shoreline was awakening. Somewhere children were rubbing sleep from their eyes. Somewhere fishermen were preparing their boats. Somewhere another soul was stepping outside to greet the first light of a brand-new day.
The earth had not lost the sun.
It had simply turned.
Perhaps life is more like that than we realize.
We often think in absolutes. We speak of beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, births and deaths. Yet nature whispers a gentler truth. The seasons never stop; they simply change places. The tide that leaves one shore is already returning to another. Sunset and sunrise are not opposites. They are companions, occurring together in the same eternal moment, depending only upon where we stand.
Maybe our lives are like that as well.
Childhood gives way to adulthood, not because one has vanished, but because another season has quietly arrived. Careers end so new purposes may begin. Relationships change their form but often leave love itself untouched. Even grief, painful though it is, slowly becomes gratitude wearing quieter clothes.
And perhaps death itself belongs to that same mystery.
James Dillet Freeman expressed it more beautifully than I ever could:
She has put on invisibility...
I do not doubt that You are there as here,
And You will hold her dear.
Then comes the line that has remained in my heart ever since I first read it:
"...she will find it is not death but dawn."
None of us can say with certainty what lies beyond the horizon of this life. Every faith, every philosophy, every hopeful heart reaches toward that mystery with different words.
But I have always found comfort in this image: the sun never dies. It only passes beyond our sight.
Perhaps love does something very much the same.
This morning, as I sip this second cup of coffee and listen to the birds greeting a world made new, I realize that grief and gratitude can sit together quite peacefully. One reminds us that someone is absent from our eyes. The other reminds us that they remain present in our hearts.
The light they gave us does not disappear.
It continues traveling through everyone whose life they touched.
So if today finds you saying goodbye—to a loved one, to a season of life, to a dream that has run its course—remember the lesson of the sun.
What looks like sunset from where you stand may, beyond your sight, already be someone else's dawn.
Perhaps that is the deepest hope we are given: that love, like light, is never destroyed.
It simply changes its perspective.
And somewhere, just beyond the horizon we cannot yet see, morning is already breaking.
~Wylddane
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