Some people, I recognize, simply know this kind of stuff. They are bent that way. Perhaps they took lots of science classes in school, or in a fit of curiosity along the way, studied up on it and integrated the perfectly fitted knowledge. That's not me.
I was not the math and science guy so in vogue these days. I sang in the school choir, competed with the speech team, and performed in school plays. I didn't blow things up in the science lab. In college, when the curriculum forced me into yet another lab science, I tried to get "Gourmet Cooking" qualified - it included a lab requirement, after all - but the Dean said "no." Word around campus was that Astronomy was the blow-off class that anybody could pass. I registered, faithfully attended the first four classes and then, with an exam closely approaching and I not having understood a single word heard or read, quietly dropped the class.
But the evening sky this week erased all that feckless indifference. It was, hmm, different. It was as haunting as it was beautiful. I was captivated, curiously troubled and yet strangely warmed. For once I wanted more than to simply receive it with gratitude; this time I wanted to somehow understand it. How can it be that somewhere in the universe above me and the chicken yard, in the waning moments of a day suspended in the stranglehold of a season stifled by cloying pandemic fear and isolation a phenomenon so evocative and poignant could ephemerally materialize? I snapped the picture, but by the time I returned indoors a few moments later it was gone.
Where does the purple/pink of sunset come from? Scratching around several internet-offered explanations, I could only smile at the summary answer. I should have guessed. It's almost always the explanation of the origin of larger-than-life beauty.
Struggle.
Adversity.
Obstacles surmounted.
In the vineyard, the best grapes emerge from vines that have struggled into challenging soil. On the stage or the playing field, the finest, most artful performances result from the most rigorous practice and rehearsal. And in the evening sky, it turns out that the most alluring colors are daubed by sunlight that has traveled the farthest from the horizon, along the way stripped of its light-weight blues by molecular obstacles and interferences and storm clouds.
Distance.
Distortion.
Disturbance.
Interruption.
It is color that has had to work hard to find us. And the result is beauty, itself.
Somehow, in days like these when obstacles and limitations and the ominous hovering of metaphorical clouds are palpably - oppressively - present; in this season during which beauty seems a distant enough and pale phenomenon, this wisdom from the evening sky speaks grace to me. And I not only better understand; I am even more deeply grateful.
