The Sunset Club

 I'm pretty frugal. I spend most of my money on food, a good safe car, and excellent optics. Sure, I'll do a therapeutic shop every once in a blue moon, but you can bet it'll be at an outlet store (Hello, Eddie Bauer Outlet and Warehouse, thanks for dressing me top to toe!) I pretty much loathe movie theaters, paying lots of money to watch something ehh, and standing in line for anything. Drag me to an amusement park and I'm likely to spend my time watching people and the house sparrows, scrambling for crumbs.  I don't like to sit down to do anything but draw or write, and half the time I'm standing at the drawing table. So: Frugal and restless.

One of the things I absolutely loved about Sanibel Island when I visited years ago was the sunset culture that thrives there. People actually plan for sunset. They walk or get in their cars and carry lawnchairs to the beach to watch it, sort of loosely together. I thought that was the most wonderful thing! A whole community gets that the best show they can watch is free, and they gather to watch it together.

So it is entirely in keeping that I've become attached to watching sunrises and sunsets. Sure, we all enjoy a good sunset, but how many of us actually make a date with them, and get up while it's still dark to assess the cloud/sun/sky potential, or prep dinner at 3 pm so as to be out for the 5:45pm February matinee?  I ask this rhetorically, knowing that too many most excellent nominees for the Sunset Club are likely to be on a conference call or otherwise locked inside when the show starts, and for that I apologize. Long summer evenings are coming!

The first thing we do when a meeting of the Sunset Club commences is get outside somewhere picturesque. The regularly meeting Club currently consists of a President and Vice President. Here is the Veep, reporting for duty. We have members in Maine, Whipple, and Marietta, Ohio as well. You can join. I don't even have to know about it. The only requirements are that you be mindful of good sunrise/sunset opportunities, pay attention, and are properly appreciative of the shows.

Tip: Try to attain a high promontory before the show reaches full intensity. The climbing is good for your heart, and the view is good for your soul.

Dress warmly. Temperatures can plummet near sunset.

Pay attention to the main show; i.e. the one going on, Stage West, around the fabled star upon which we depend for all life.  This goes without saying. BOOM.

However, you must make sure to spin around to take in the auxiliary show, which is often as good or, in its own way, better than the one on the main stage.

Yes. All of these photos make me want to lie down and roll around in the cold damp grass. Perfectly permissible, if you're dressed for it. See where the "high promontory" comes in? It's best to get up so high you've got unobstructed views both west and east.

East views can be gentler, less dramatic, but so powerful, too.

Don't forget to whip around and see what that star of our is up to, though!

In the Sunset Club, we do a lot of spinning around.

Watching sunsets is all about gratitude. It's about feeling very small and humble as something much larger and more grandiose than anything you could dream of goes on all around you. 

It's about paying attention, too, and setting your body clock to 4:15 pm, to look outside and notice whether there are nice clouds floating over, clouds with the potential to dazzle when lit by the matchless spectrum of the low setting sun. It's about situational awareness: not letting such a thing slip by because you were otherwise occupied. 

The Sunset Club is founded on seeking out your joy, and making a conscious effort to connect with it, no matter what else may be going on in your life.

It's about being thankful for all we are given, every single day. And that includes every moment of every day. Each one is a gift. It's up to us to use those moments well. 

Counting your blessings is an excellent use of moments. Phoebe told me to name them every night before I close my eyes. Good exercise. The child shall lead...

I'll leave you with a thought that Shila gave me when I was struggling. 

"What we focus on expands. Which is bad when we focus on fear and lack."

So I'm making a conscious effort to focus not on what I long for, but on all that is joyful and abundant in my life, the people and things, big and small, that I'm so thankful for that it raises a lump in my throat.

See you at sunset?

Amish Country Sunset

So we're tooling along Kansas Road near Kidron, Ohio, looking for snowy owls in a desultory sort of way, and the sunset is settling in and getting moreso. A pair of rough-legged hawks fusses and tumbles, silhouetted. One is a dark morph, the other, who can tell? We decide to be satisfied.

Sunlight is coming through windows in the outbuildings. Phoebe points it out and Shila and I swing our lenses toward it.

Phoebe says she wants a jigsaw puzzle made of our photos. It sounds like a good idea to me.

It all just makes me want to paint, this light and the way it hits the buildings. It's nice to think that I could do it if I wanted to, just become a painter of barns and horses and landscapes. But I like what I'm doing now, writing and painting and traveling around giving talks, too much to stop. I have a burst of gratefulness that still lingers. I wish I had more time to tool around looking for beautiful things in places I've never been. And then the time to make watercolors of them.  

This farmer sells eggs and potatoes from the house. The signs out front say so. I think those are raspberries neatly trained on stakes. If raspberries can ever be neat, these are. 

The sun is smacking the west side of the farmhouse, gilding it. The snow's gone rose-pink. It is so cold outside, but the colors are so warm and inviting. We get out of the car just long enough to ooh, ahh, click and retreat. This farm has such beautiful trees, too.

And on the lee side, some ravishing Belgians. One moves over for a little comfort from the two-toned mare as the light goes pink and dies behind them. 

We hurry on, rolling over snow-covered roads in the trusty Subaru, chasing the last light. We had planned to go to The Wilds, a reclaimed strip mine about another hour southeast, planned to go see a golden eagle and some short-eared owls, but the light has wrapped itself around us and held us here for the sunset. 

Sometimes the best part of a day can be the moment when you scrap your plans and realize that being in this moment, in the light of this hour, is the best plan of all.

Under Tropical Skies

At the risk of giving you severe whiplash, I have to go back to Guyana now. I have loved being in Ohio for the winter; I think it has shown its best side, and sharing it with you has been a blast. But I need to remember Guyana, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and share it, too, before the joyous riot of spring hits Ohio and I'm chasing down bright warblers in dappled woods. It is a life full of possibility and promise.

Having just exposed the many beauties of the ice and snow, I thought I'd show you a tropic sky that I expect never to see again. We were at at a delightful eco-resort not far from the Rupununi River, in the savannahs at the foot of a mountain range. Yes, there are mountains in Guyana; it's one of the reasons it's so diverse in flora and fauna. On an evening at Rockview Lodge, Kevin Loughlin, Mike Weedon, guide Luke Johnson and I took an easy stroll along the foothills of the Pakaraima Mountain Range.

We were passed by a bicycle odd couple. Get a load of the wheels!
An ancient form of transport: burro.

I tried so hard to capture the shadowed landscape and the towering thunderheads, but Kevin Loughlin patiently explained why my camera just couldn't do both. I had to pick either the sky or the landscape for my light reading. So I picked the sky.

Even toward evening, it was hotter than Hades. I'm not used to sweating at sundown. But the sky made me forget my discomfort; everywhere I looked was a party. I look at this and almost expect a unicorn to stroll out of the trees.

But the best was around the corner. As we stood gaping at the changing cloud formations, a big flock of Nacunda nighthawks appeard out of nowhere, skimming low over the savanna. The Nacunda is a huge bird, paler below than any nightjar save the sand-colored. The light was far too low and the birds too swift for photos, but it was an experience I'll always remember, to be surrounded by them, almost ducking as they swept by.

Looking up from the birds, I spotted something in the sky I wasn't sure I could be seeing.

A hole had appeared in the cloud layer, a hole with colors of mother-of-pearl.


Iridescent pink, green, gold and blue shimmered and changed in evanescent waves. The only other place I've ever seen such hues are in the Northern Lights.

Perhaps these were the Southern Lights.

We walked back in near total darkness. When night falls near the equator, it falls with a clunk. I felt lucky to be alive, lucky to have seen the hues of a different rainbow in a place so far from home.

At the risk of ruining the mother-of-pearl glow of this post, I'm marooned at Pico Bonito Lodge in Honduras as we speak, plugged in, wishing it would stop raining but knowing it won't. Birding in this is like standing under a hose, bumbershoot weather. Maybe it's God's way of forcing me to check some birds off on the list, catch up with email, download some photos. Dunno, but when you've got three days left of a tropical birding trip, it's kind of a drag. Cotingas, denied! Still, it's warm and green and wet and very, very beautiful, and I'm sure many of y'all would prefer it to another durn Nor'easter. But it makes me miss my babehs.
Home Friday. Sigh. Somebody out there, part the clouds?

Did You See the Sky Last Night?

The storm front that brought such destruction to the states just south of us brought us terrible winds in the wee hours of February 6, winds that it seemed would tear the roof off the house. I spoke with a friend from down the road, whose house also tops a hill, and she said she lay awake all night, unable to get this image out of her head: That the wind would take the roof off her house and suck her two youngest daughters out of their cribs. I lay awake with similar thoughts, constructing disaster scenarios. Finally I got up and paced from window to window, my limbic system having taken over completely. I muttered like a mother lion, thinking about how and when I should take the kids to the basement, knowing that I'd never see a twister coming in the inky darkness. We all ended up in bed together, Baker too, listening. He is stunningly unfazed by lightning or thunder, high winds or rain. But he comforts where he can.

All the storm brought us was rain, some creek and river flooding, and a sunset of unbelievable beauty and majesty. It was like an apology for the terror of the night before. It all started yesterday evening with a sudden downpour, a burst of late sun, and a big fat rainbow, plunging down behind our pear tree.

Ranks of puffy thunderheads marched away off to the southwest, over our meadow. Creamy clouds are ever my favorites.
I shot a lot of creamy cloud photos, and realized we had better get our hineys up in the tower to get the best views, because this was going to be one humdinger of a sunset. There, we discovered a lavender and pink wonderland unseen from the ground, off to the north. I wish I could tell you how those distant ridges looked, lit with peach and apricot. This picture only hints at it all. It's not often you see steely clouds march across a flamingo-pink backdrop.
One little red cloud rose up in the southwest sky, seemingly still inflamed from the previous night's battle.
I whipped back around to the north to see more alpenglow and pink fantasy. I felt I was missing something no matter which way I faced.
Now it was getting serious off to the west. The kids and I were freezing in the rapidly dropping temperature; the wind was still whipping. I stripped off my coat to wrap Liam up and kept shooting.
A closeup of that coral tornado:Here's the wispy underlit backdrop to the pink tornado. At this point we were howling in appreciation.
I think the name I put on this jpeg is sunsetjustridiculous20608:
Finally, everything went kind of steely with just licks of crimson and rose, and suddenly the show was over. We were all breathless with cold and catharsis. These clouds looked to us like dragon heads, coming to eat the sun. Or, as Liam said, "A Triceratops, biting off a piece of plant."
It's hard to know what to do with sunset photos. I take a lot of them, but rarely find a way to say much of worth about them. Sunsets just are. Their beauty is so intense, yet fleeting, that I feel I have to make some homage to it. I have to do something about it. And so I run out and take photo after photo, and then I run up to the top of our tower and take more. It's cool to be able to capture just a little bit of it and share it here, but putting a winter sunset in a rectangle never does it justice. It's like looking at a still from a movie, minus the action and music. It's being bathed in that glow, feeling part of some unique and irreplaceable natural happening in 360-degree panorama that makes my heart race. I spent today in the company of two of my best girlfriends, and both of them led off our separate conversations with, "Did you see the sky last night?? I wanted to call you!"