Journal of Sacred Work

if you like my poems let them
walk in the evening, a little behind you
-e.e. cummings

   I have written once before to you, many months ago, about the phases of the sunset, how the evening feels if we are present to her as day falls away. In Florida, where I worked for three years of my life, people pay more attention to the sunset than they do in most other parts of the country. Perhaps it’s the presence of so much water that invites presence to evenings where poems walk a little behind us. My wife and I are lucky enough to vacation in a place that sees the ocean on one side and the intracoastal waterway on the other. Water lives all around us. On an evening of rest, we watched the sun collapse into the horizon…

   So many of us miss some of the best gifts of evening when we go inside as soon as sun’s first explosion fades. I divide the sunset into four phases as a way of seeking to identify the stages of her beauty. Phase One is the sun’s setting, how the she acts like a horse who’s caught the scent of the barn and races for home. Whenever the sun gets caught a moment in low clouds that screen her face crimson, I think of the first metaphor that was taught to me. I was in the eighth grade and we were reading The Red Badge of Courage. "The sun was a red wafer, pasted in the sky," Stephan Crane wrote. "This is a metaphor," Mr. O’Leary, our English teacher explained. "Crane doesn’t say the sun was like a red wafer. That would be a simile. Crane says the sun is a red wafer. It’s more powerful," he continued. And I imagined the sun hanging low over a Gettysburg battlefield in a Civil War sky, a cookie about to be eaten by the mouth hiding behind the mountains.
   But there are three more phases in my sunset experience. In Phase Two, the sun has vanished. But, like the life of a martyred saint or any person we loved that has left this world, an afterglow remains. Heated pinks and burning yellows drench a good, post sunset sky. Water drinks in these colors softening
them to paler hues.

   What else could be left? In Phase Three, pink goes purple. I call Phase Three "The Royal" phase. No artist, no matter how gifted, can capture the elegant luminescence of a purple sky. But something is always happening behind us. The eastern horizon foreshadows Phase Four. In the east, the evening has already gone blind.
   In Phase Four, the stage lights have faded to black. If we are present to this stage, what we see is once-blue water turned ebony, her surface oiled with the faint presence of night. Clouds are charcoal sketches. The land is dotted with the here-and-there winks of electric lights.
   Loving care is like the phases of evening. We can turn away in the first phase, or we can stay with life as she passes through her stages. A rare group of caregivers live all the stages.
   To be present to evening is to live with transition. We can notice the life phases of patients and team members and ourselves as we glide through states of consciousness. We are with each other, and ourselves, for one season or all four. To cultivate presence through loving care is to hang on through the winter, to survive into the glory of spring. And to enrich our experience of each other and of our own, precious lives.

-Erie Chapman