In Defense of the Wooded Sunset
The ocean gets all the glory when it comes to sunsets. And I get it. There is something about being able to watch the full path of the sun as it dips below the horizon. To see the light fracture into seemingly infinite shards. To watch the sky catch fire in oranges and reds and deep purples.
But this isn’t about the overly lauded ocean sunset. No, today we honor the humble woods.
A wooded sunset is a sneaky thing. As the sun begins to set, the light is shattered and diffused. It’s never as dark as we’d think and never as light as it feels it should be. The finality is almost in question. It’s an encompassing darkness that brings with it a shift in the very world around us.
The light becomes unreliable, shadows are deeper in parts as our eyes trouble to adjust to the range of sunlight still struggling through the trees. There's a weight to the darkness that wasn’t there before. It’s almost a sense of unreality, of unfamiliarity where once was the everyday.
The sounds change and dampen. The most vocal of the birds have long retired, and even the slight chirp of a swift begins to fade into cricket chirp and the sharp queak of swooping bats. The silence stands out too as the most obvious of sounds, the ones we’d relegated to unnoticed background noise, are suddenly absent. Traffic has died down, planes aren’t as often overhead, and the squirrels and chipmunks have ceased their incessant leaf scumping. If we’re near water, even the burbling of a creek feels muted as if the water has slowed down with the oncoming night.
The sunlight still pierces here and there, brilliant rays of light that, too, become muted as time passes. There isn’t a grand finale, no dramatic pop as the sun disappears below the horizon. Instead, we get a blueblack sky with just enough light left to silhouette the trees.
It’s nothing spectacular and much less dramatic. But there are astounding beauties in the gentleness of a wooded sunset. It’s of a softer sort. And, while the sun feels so distant when dropping beneath distant waves, it’s easy to feel a part of the shift when in the woods. As if we’re along for the journey as we all move through that magical middle between day and night.
