How to watch the sunset
And why you might want to
I want to tell you about the sunset, and it is the only thing I want to tell you about.
You could argue that it is not the most important thing for me to tell you about, right now. That might be true. There are other things. I’ve told you about many of them before. And other things I haven’t told you about before, some of those are very important too, and I think I should tell you about them.
But the only thing I have to say to you today is about the sunset. I’m not sure why, maybe because this week was the vernal equinox, but this is all I have to give.
The truth is I feel broken and empty, that I have nothing to offer. I feel there is nothing left of me at all. But I have the sunset, so that is what I can give you.
I am obsessed with sunsets.
From a poem I wrote in 2022:
when you were young you thought maybe some things, like sunsets, were trite.
but trite judges, and it’s not for you to judge the sunset.
when you grow older you understand how important it is to stand every day before something that cannot be judged, and in return does not judge you.Here is a story about sunsets.
Once, a few years ago, on a warm summer evening, I was up on the roof watching the sun set, as I do. One of my children came up to the roof to ask me for something, I don’t remember what. “Not now,” I said. “I’m watching the sunset.”
“You and your fucking sunsets,” said the child, contemptuously, as if pointing out a cocaine addiction. I laughed and laughed. Of all the things to fault me for, child, you try sunset? Surely the purest, most innocent, most wholesome of my habits. I have many terrible habits (although not a cocaine addiction), but the child commented on none of those. They commented on my fucking sunsets.
In exchange for telling you this story about the child, at whom I laughed, I will tell another story in which the child got to laugh at me, still laughs, a story in which I look very stupid: once, in the early days of my iphone, when I didn’t take photos, we were all out to afternoon tea at the ritz. I tried to take a photo of said child, but it was blurry. “Touch the nose of the person you want the camera to focus on,” someone (probably Max) said helpfully. I reached out and touched the child’s nose. They laughed and laughed. “No,” they said, “ON YOUR SCREEN”.1
Maybe those stories are the same story, about how I am always resisting the glowing little screens. They never seem as real to me as my child’s actual nose, as the changing light of golden hour.
Golden hour, when the universe rains gold upon us and watches to see if we will try to gather it up, preserve it, or just watch it — let it lie where it falls, soon to dissipate, like fairy dust.
Have you ever peeled an orange in a sunbeam and watched the way the peel releases a golden mist in that light? Try it sometime, it’s sublime.
***
A few days ago I saw a whole Instagram reel devoted to pictures of black cats turning brown in sunlight, as they all do. We have a black cat, and in the sun, yes, he’s the most glorious brown I’ve ever seen.
That’s what sunlight does.
It happens every day, the sunset.
It happens, the sunset, in the world of bodies. We may live in boxes inside boxes inside boxes, looking at or into yet more boxes, shiny boxes, glowing boxes, with little shiny glowing moving things happening inside them, but I am so tired of the boxes, and more and more I just want to live in the whole sensuous scented world outside of the boxes.
Not “thinking outside the box,” as when there is an offsite on the topic of “how to grow by 20% year over year forever, with no additional headcount, c’mon people, Think Outside the Box”. To LIVE outside the box, which is a way of thinking too, I guess, but with your whole body, and with the whole world and everything in it.
Realities, and Virtual Realities
A developer demo inside the Vision Pro: The earth, in VR, spinning slowly in front of me. A menu: “spring equinox”.
I reach out to touch it, but there is nothing to touch. “The haptics aren’t there yet,” the owner of the Vision Pro says. And yes, they will be, but haptics are an illusion. The motion picture is an illusion too, it’s not that I fault illusions.2 But here on the real earth I can take my shoes off, dig my toes into the mud, touch grass. Ground. Ground and look up at the sky, the heavens whirling above me, the sky that goes on forever, to the edge of existence.
Am I talking about the sunset? Yes, and also more. I’m talking about Reality, the reality that exists in the flesh and bone and blood and breath and earth and sky and wind and rain. In the glorious, magnificent, embodied present.
Equinox
This week it was the spring equinox.
A spinning blue ball that I cannot touch tells me nothing I didn’t already know about the equinox from watching the sun set every night in a different place, at a different time, moving across the sky from northwest to southwest along the horizon, year after year after year. Long, long days in late June, when the sun sets in the northwest (from my roof, it sets over Brighton, north of Corey Hill, 303 WNW, according to timeanddate.com ); short, short ones days in December, when it sets in the southwest (behind Aspinwall Hill, around 238 WSW, same source) - in December, I can see the sunset from bed, blessedly, since at that time of year I am very often in bed.
I’d like my job to be to watch the sun every day, to make sure it rises and sets. Or maybe just to Witness. There once was such a job, in many societies, at many times. I think I would be good at that job. I am no longer sure what else I might be good at, if anything.
As I said, I feel worthless, empty. Monstrous, even.
But look what I have for you: the sunset.
The vernal equinox is the day the sun sets exactly in the middle between the place it sets on the summer solstice and the place it sets on the winter solstice. At the equator, the day is exactly 12 hours long. Up here in Boston, it’s a few minutes longer.
If “equal day length” sounds sort of dull, if the solstices seem more inherently interesting, then here’s an interesting fact about equinoxes for you:[equinoxes are the days around which the length of the day changes the fastest. The rate at which the days get longer is faster in the weeks around the spring equinox and it is speculated, theorized, that it is the rate of change rather than just the raw increase of day length that is in part, responsible for, or exacerbates, the phenomenon called Spring Fever. April, “the cruelest month”, is also the month that in the northern hemisphere sees the most hospital admissions for both mania and attempted suicide. It’s an unstable time.
Indeed, I feel unstable.
The astronomical reason for this increased rate of change is a little complicated and involves trigonometry, specifically (not quite) sine waves, but you don’t have to understand it astronomically or mathematically to feel it in your body, the instability.
My body is loud, and my feelings are large, so I feel all of this in my body. I feel the sun and the moon, I feel the sap rising in the trees, I feel the eyes of the robin I stopped to watch the other morning, digging around in dust looking for insects. He watched me too, we watched each other, and the feeling of spring was large in us both.
People like sunsets.
In trying to explain about sunsets, I found a study someone did about why sunsets more than other vistas — because, it appears, they are ephemeral. It’s cool they did a study, but it also annoys me, because it bothers me that we need studies to tell us obvious things, like: people like sunsets.
But we live in a world where only the quantified matters, and we need a study to show that people will pay extra money to experience a sunset view, and it is only by assigning a monetary value to the sunset view that we can show it has any kind of value, because all value must be translated into money. If it can’t be translated into money, is it even value? DOES IT EVEN EXIST? (When I am not earning money, do I even exist?)
There’s something so User Research about the enterprise — and I love User Research, I do, it’s fascinating and important work! — but I don’t love it applied to the sunset, as though the sunset is a product. As though the sunset needs metrics to understand its customer base, to calculate the total addressable market for sunsets, to accurately set its pricing and packaging.
The sunset demands our attention not because it is optimizing for it but because it is NOT.
***
I hate this drive to make everything so fucking measurable while so utterly missing the point, often deliberately.
I hate a lot of things, these days.
Some days it feels like I am nothing but hate, nothing but rage. I blame hormones, I blame politics, I blame myself. But I also think maybe it’s just our swiftly tilting planet.
I hate a lot of things these days.
But I love the sunset.
How to watch the sunset
Find a westward-facing view. You don’t need an unobstructed view of the horizon, and actually the sunset can be enjoyed even if you only have a sliver of sky. Here’s the sunset from the sliver of sky I could see in Arizona when camping down in a wash near the Gila river:
In fact, in fact, you don’t even need to see to enjoy the sunset. You can enjoy the sun setting with every sense — the feeling on your skin of the breeze that comes in the evening, of the warmth of the sun fading, replaced by chill. You can hear the birds and the insects and the frogs and all the animals who are active at sunset, yes, even in the city you might hear them, if you listen. You might taste and smell the air that comes at sunset. You might hear the wind in the trees or blowing leaves around. You might feel moisture, or its lack.
Where I watch the sunset, I sometimes see seagulls, who hang around the parking lot of the grocery store just beyond my own back parking lot. Sometimes, like the other night, there will be a murmuration of starlings, and if you don’t know what a murmuration of starlings is, have a look at these videos from Rome. Once in a while I’ll see a bat, more often, mourning doves, a red-tailed hawk, and chimney swifts. Chimney swifts are the fastest birds in regular flight, and they are FAST. (Peregrine falcons are faster, but only when diving). The bunnies come out around sunset, too, and I like to see them, if I happen to be at ground level, which I’m usually not.
If you do have a westward view, don’t forget to also look any other direction you can see. The sunset happens all over the sky, and all over the land, and all over the water too. The sunset is everywhere. From where I watch, from my roof, I might spend as much time facing east, watching the Pru turn pink, or the VA turn purple. There are 3 tall cranes right now toward my northeast, and they reflect the sunset too. The sunset sometimes turns my black roof gold and sometimes turns puddles on it pink. After rain, during a sunset, the rainbow will be toward the east, away from the setting sun ( a rainbow is always in the opposite direction of the sun, fyi!).
When the sun is setting, you might see rays of light break through clouds.
You might see clouds of various types at various layers in the sky, moving at various speeds — drifting together, falling apart, billowing, blowing, breaking, disintegrating into rain or mist at their bottom edges, glowing pink or magenta or gold or purple or blue or white. You might see something called green flash, even, which I just learned about recently.
On a very cloudy or rainy or snow day you might see nothing much at all, but I suggest you at least glance out a window once in a while even on such evenings — sometimes those barely-there sunsets will surprise you. Sometimes, just after the sun sets is when you get the most unexpected action, especially if the sun “sets” behind something else before it sets at the actual horizon, which you very often may not be able to see.
Look for brightly shining edges, luminous pink highlights, stray rays, breaks in the clouds, look at all of it, there is so much of it to see.
The Moon
Once you start looking at the sunset you’ll also begin to notice the moon: a sliver of it new, shining in the west, also moving on towards setting; a half moon directly above you, a full moon rising in the east just before or just after the sun sets. When the moon is very new, sometimes you see the dark of it too, a sliver of bright, and the rest of the moon just a shadow on the surface of the sky.
Like the sun, the moon rises in the east and sets in the west. But because the moon is orbiting the earth, it moves laterally as it rises and sets, fast enough to notice with the naked eye, and this is one reason it can be so much trickier to find than the sun. Timeanddate.com, and a compass, can help you find the moon where you are, it’ll tell you its altitude and its azimuth. As you watch the moon more, you will begin to understand how it moves through the month in a way that is frankly impossible to grasp by merely reading about it, by reaching out to not-touch a simulation of it. Like dancing, or fucking, or loving, or cooking or living itself, we learn any rhythm best by participating in it.
To best participate in the sunset (and to best watch the moon, too), put your phone away.
No, I don’t do that all the time either. But it does make the experience better. You can try to take photos with your phone, but they will mostly not be good, and you will waste a lot of time trying to make them good and you will forget to look at the actual celestial event. If you want to get into celestial event photography, you will need a real camera and some good instructions, and even then, a photograph is only an image of only one moment, it’s so much more flattened than the actual event.
The sunset is everywhere and always-changing. Put your phone down and experience it. Dance with it. Breathe with it. If you think I sound a little crazy, well, I am. I’m a lunatic, and an opacaraphile. If you think this is all a little bit woo-woo, that’s true, but have you considered the benefits of participating in woo?
Of course you can subscribe to an app that shows you an animated dot to breathe along with while a British man with a calming voice tells you to breathe in, breathe out. You can go to an IMAX theater and experience something immersive, you can put on a three pound mask and pretend to touch a rotating blue image of the earth. Or you can imagine, perhaps, that you have something to gain by joining in the actual motion of the earth and the heavens, if only for a few moments a day. You might find that you lose only a few moments of doing in exchange for gaining, well, the entire motherfucking universe.
Yes, of course I’m passionate about this.
Even in my emptiness and despair I am passionate about this.
Sad!
Sometimes the sunset makes me sad. (Everything makes you sad, Amy, you say. That’s true, but my sadness is not all one thing, and it’s still worthwhile to talk about the different shapes and shades of sad, just as it is worthwhile to talk about the different shades and shapes of clouds.)
I think when I am sad about the sunset, that’s because it’s so evanescent and it really can’t be captured and it’s so important to me and no one else I’ve met cares this much about it. It’s lonely.
City people are often oblivious to the natural events around them. Even other people I know who like a sunset don’t like a sunset the way I do, that they’ll stand in freezing wind wearing two coats on a night there is a good one. So yeah, there’s a loneliness. I experience something beautiful and impermanent that moves me deeply and I do so as a spiritual practice, like prayer. But I have never found a minyan or a coven or even a single other person who will give as much of their time and attention to this thing that has become so important to me.
The travels of the sun and moon mark enormous changes in the natural world even as they repeat themselves over and over in reassuring near-regularity, and yet most modern people ignore them.
The Rupture of Time
Sometimes we don’t just ignore the rhythms of the world, we insult them. What is daylight savings time but an insult to the natural rhythms we evolved to live in, are part of? Look at this disjuncture, like a fault line in time:
It’s not real, that break, but we must move to it anyways. Fuck reality, we say, time is an abstraction and we must bend to the abstraction at the expense of our nature. We must be as productive in December as in June. We must pretend the natural world doesn’t matter, doesn’t even exist. Pretend to touch a sterile spinning blue ball in pretend space. Call that simulation wondrous, magical, transcendent even. Approaching a Singularity, if not quite there yet. (Any day now, any day, with just a little more investment…)
Miss the real show entirely, allow ourselves to be mesmerized by the simulation. Do I sound like a Luddite? Good — I would like to be a Luddite. I would like to bend technology to the use I want to make of it, not to the use that a corporation would like technology to make of me.
Let’s ask again: Why am I telling you about the sunset, even though there are more momentous happenings in the world?
Presence
I’ve just finished reading a book called The Spell of the Sensuous. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s so, so interesting, and so good, and so beautifully written, and so mind-altering.
One of the points the author makes is that it is impossible to live in right relation to anything at all, including the truth, if you do not live in right relation to the actual place in which you find yourself living — to your own body and those of every other creature living in that place, and to the nonliving happenings of that place too, to the hills and rocks and skies of that place.
Only by being deeply here, in and of this place, am I palpably connected to every other place. However much I may be concerned by events unfurling on the far side of the globe, and however insistently those happenings shove themselves through my various screens and headsets, my primary responsibility must be to the realm that I ceaselessly inhabit with the whole of my creaturely flesh, and to the palpable relationships that I sustain in this realm.3
My daily participation in the sunset is one way I try to live in right relation to my self, my body, and my place. It’s deeply satisfying at times when hardly anything satisfies me. I’m telling you about the sunset because if I do not have that, I can’t ever tell you about anything else.
I trust I’ll have other things to tell you again. I always do. But also — even if I turn into Mary Oliver and only ever again tell you about the sunset, bark, spider mites, moss — if that’s my path, well, somebody has got to do that work too. We cannot live without a sense of wonder at Reality. Some of the work some of us must do is therefore, rightly, to help others of us experience that wonder.
I hope that my telling you today about the sunsets helps you experience more wonder.
From a different poem I wrote, this one in 2021:
What did I do wrong again, to find myself here,
watching the sunset, an event that cannot
be purchased at all, that requires not my labor
but my attention, requires, indeed, my rest?
What does it mean to rest?
What does it mean to sit here
worth nothing, producing no value,
as the world continues
to spin and the clouds turn pink
for no particular purpose at all.
Why do I think I did wrong to end up here, at rest?
How long can I watch fluff from some tree drift in the air
in the last light of the sun before the noise catches up
with me and necessity drives me again to production,
to the Sisyphean work of proving my worth to those
who have always already judged me deficient?
Let me prove my worth to the sunset instead,
let me worship the full moon rising
and leave off loving my work,
that terrible mistress,
who is nothing like the sun.
Thanks for reading,
Amy
ps I hate being interrupted in my own reading by 10 subscribe buttons, but you could subscribe if you like. I send these missives on no particular schedule and they are all different. Or you can smash the reply button, I like when people reply. Also I need to shill for my part-time job as an engineering career and leadership coach, see more here.
as always, if I tell you a story about a child, I have talked with that child about the story first
Really! I’m not trying to shit on the Vision Pro. I know people who are really really into VR, who like the creative possibilities, who think it’s exciting and full of promise, and I get it, I do. It’s just … not what I want right now. Even though yes, my very favorite episode of Black Mirror was the gay one with the immersive virtual reality and the happy ending!
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