The world is always with us. So often though, it only exists on the periphery of our awareness. We live in it but with little acknowledgement of its presence. It impacts on us more when it fails us than when it provides for our needs. At sunset times, however, it calls to us, granting an opportunity to become intimately aware of its being there. If we stop and look, we may be pulled into a rich sense of its presence and of its intrinsic wonder. We may lapse into silence as our sense of self retreats into the background and we come face-to-face with the world. We are left standing breathless behind the huge majesty of this earthly moment; lost in the stillness of the transition as light leaves and darkness arrives. The world changes with no conflict only the gentleness of going and the quietness of coming; marking the gracefulness of the world’s rotating dance in front of the giver of life.     

My wife and I seek out these moments as often as we can. We love to go walking, hand-in-hand at the edge of the day on the banks of Lake Ontario searching for the stillness and finding intimacy with the world and intimacy between us. This time of wonder seems to facilitate a connection with the world but also opens pathways of intimacy flowing from one to the other. It seems that sunset allows the development of a rich intimacy that is harder to nurture and experience in other times of the passage of the day. 

Through the multitude of such walks, I have seen a pattern that often develops in our conversation. I do not know if it is from the nature of the experience of this time that pushes one’s self into the background; perhaps it just comes from disengaging from our life activities; perhaps it is from a longing to be close; but, with this gift, we go to stand before the silence of the setting sun, with nothing to do but experience being there.

I embrace this pattern of communication that we seem, so frequently, to follow as we walk through the golden hour.

We seem to start like this. We hold hands. It is very difficult to walk at sunset and not hold hands. It allows an opportunity to acknowledge the other even though no words are spoken for long moments. Holding hands allows the sharing of such silent moments without causing a breach in being together. We talk at first of the day gone by and the day to come. Perhaps initially of mishaps and difficulties, but soon, as such considerations seem incongruent in this golden hour and in this state of deepening intimacy, our words turn to our experience of what we see around us.

We often talk of the trees, of their presence, their sense of being here beyond the years of our life, how each is unique, even from the other members of their family living around them. We wonder whether, throughout the whole world, could there be another tree exactly like this one before us, and we smile as we sense how unlikely that is.  It is unique.  We are stilled by the recognition of its specialness, only made apparent by our stopping, in this time of quietude, and giving it our attention. We stand at its foot and feel the connection as one unique part of this world recognizes another unique part of this world.

We sense we are in a special place, made so, not by it being what it is, but by our recognizing it, and we hold our hands a little tighter, reflecting our sense of this greater intimacy.

We point out many things, the water’s dance over the rocks on its edge, the interesting branches, small and large, that having fallen into the lake have travelled here and been washed up onto these rocks, waiting to be carried off again to find a resting point at the lake’s bottom there to join back into the ground of this earth (some, of course, have found their way, mysteriously, back into our home and now nestle against some wall or on some table, sharing their charm with us and memories of how they called to us and we made them part of our family).

We also talk about other people we see there, the young, the middle-aged, and the old, and we wonder about their stories and we feel close to them as we are all here in this place at this time of beauty. We have all come to be here now, for one purpose, perhaps with different emotions, but as the sun sinks, we all turn to watch that one event together.

As the sun gets closer to the edge of the earth rising up to meet it, our talk turns to intimacy; to the intimacy that lies between us, to the pleasure we have had in living the past day as partners in this life, to the joy we have in each other, to our sense of the specialness of the other, to the wonder of being so privileged to share another’s life so deeply. Then as the sky darkens and the pinks become reds, we celebrate, in a growing, intimate silence, with our arms around each other, the wonder of being alive here in this conscious interlude, aware of being in and being a part of this great mystery of life.

And so, the sun is gone, and we walk back to the car in the fresh darkness of the early night, in deep peace from our walk and talk at the edge of the day along the banks of Lake Ontario.