TWILIGHT

There's a beautiful sunset tonight.  The sky has more clouds than is usual here in Los Angeles and they have a deep blue-grey color. There's a church not far away and the top of its steeple is lighted and stands out; it has that sun-is-setting glow that seems to come in the early evening.  Looking west, the clouds make a pattern on the sky and in between them is a vivid band of gold and orange. This is the sort of scene that makes me want to keep looking.  It slows me down so that I can watch the colors and the light fade. There is a line of palm trees now silhouetted against the sky, the tall thin kind, and they too are still as if caught in whatever slow motion world I've gladly entered.
     The lights of the city are already coming on.  The deepening dark of the clouds now looks like velvet as if they have a nap, a surface dimension.  The orange has become a red made of many tones, as if it were airbrushed onto the sky. Everything is full of a slow evolving, an almost imperceptible transformation.
     Watching, I feel right-sized.  My ego is stilled and I become part of what I'm looking out at.  It reminds me of a wonderful poem by the Polish Noble Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz.  He was in Berkeley when he wrote it and looking out at the day rather than night.  But stopping for a moment, sighing a sigh of release, connecting with the beautiful world around us - it's all the same.

       A day so happy.
       Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
       Hummingbirds were stopping over honey-
          suckle flowers.
       There was no thing on earth I wanted to
           possess.
       I knew no one worth my envying him.
       Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
       To think that once I was the same man did not
          embarrass me.
       In my body I felt no pain.
       When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and
          sails.