Category Archives: Sunsets

The End of the Day

Books, Philosophy/Ideas, Sunsets, The Simple Life, World of ideas

 

Many years ago, when my lads were young, we were travelling in Newfoundland for 2 weeks and stayed in a tiny motel in the tiny town of Cox’s Cove, at the far western edge of the town, which was right against the west coast of the province. It was a Friday night and people were coming home from work or going on a drive. I noticed a number of cars stopped at the end of the road, facing the oceans, and stopped for a few minutes. Then another car would come and do the same thing and then another and another. What was going on? I had to know

 

So finally, I buckled up enough courage and walked up to a stranger in a car parked at the extreme western edge of Newfoundland  and I asked him and his companion why everyone was doing that. Why were they coming to the edge of town on a Friday night to do that? “What were they doing?” I asked.  “We come to see the sunset,” the driver replied.  I was dumbstruck. They all came on a Friday night to see the sunset!  Didn’t they have anything better to do?  No. That was the point.

 

Wow. I thought about it. What a spectacular thing to do.

 

That is what I wanted to do. That might be the day I became an official inspector of sunsets. A life-long job.

 

Daniel Klein in his fabulous book Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of Fulfilment wrote about the friends around a table at the taverna on the Greek island of Hydra.  He was watching them from a nearby seat. They were sitting on the terrace in the Greek sun. Tucked behind the ear of one of the men was sprig of wild lavender that it took him considerable effort to pick up. He had to stoop to do it. He was an old man. Some things are hard for old men. During lulls in the conversation of the men, he removed the herb and took a few sniffs of it. Clearly enjoying the smell.

 

Klein was reading Epicurus on his trip to a lovely Greek Island, Hydra. He had come from America to Greece with that book in mind. It was an essential book for the trip. He was listening to the men at the table. They had a gentle conversation interspersed, from time to time, by a gaze out to the Peloponnesian Straits.  I have been on the island of Hydra, many years ago. It is a small island with a small village at the harbour. No cars are allowed. There are no roads. I was struck by the loveliness of the place so many years ago.

 

Hydra was a great place to look at sunsets. And have conversations. Like Cox’s Cove.

 

Friendship

Friends, Philosophy/Ideas, Sunsets, Travel

 

Daniel Klein lived for a while on the small Greek island called Hydra and frequently noticed a regular group of old friends who got together in a taverna where they sat on the terrace.  By a strange coincidence I remembered I had spent a couple of hours there on a sunny day in April when I was a young lad with a lovely wife. It was our first European holiday and it was wonderful. But I was a young man. I don’t think I appreciated it enough, even though I always remember it and even though we did not do much on it. It was a short visit. But a spectacular visit with nothing spectacular about it. I think we also sat on the patio of a taverna in the warm Greek sun overlooking the harbour, sipping on a drink in relaxed contentment.

 

Many years later I found out that Leonard Cohen had lived there on that island  for a long time. That was where he met Suzanne and wrote a famous song about her. A beautiful song as only Cohen can write.

 

When Klein was on the island he often sat at the taverna and from time to time noticed this group of old men. One of the old men, would stop to pick up a wild lavender and put it behind his ear and then from time to time removed it, took a sniff of it and returned it to its rightful place behind his year. A simple pleasure. Really the best kind of pleasure. Klein was reading a book of thoughts from the teachings of Epicurus an ancient Greek philosopher.

 

What kept the group together was friendship, laughs and thoughts. Klein spoke about French Philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne who had said, “I know the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from one end of the world to the other.” What a great thought. Klein then noted that “Like Epicurus, Montaigne was convinced that friendship, and the good conversation that comes with it, was the greatest pleasure available to us.”

 

Now that I am an old man, I see the wisdom in that. I am lucky to have several groups of friends. Some just men. Others, men and women. All great. All important. Life is a conversation.

Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher who enjoyed simple pleasures, like sitting around with friends watching the setting sun.

Travels with Epicurus: A Philosophy for Old Men

Books, Philosophy/Ideas, Sunsets, The Simple Life

 

Now I am an old man, but in my youth, on my first trip to Europe, many years ago,  we visited very briefly 3 islands near Athens. One of those islands was the marvelous island of Hydra.  I remember overlooking its marvelous harbour from the ship when we disembarked. It was a classic view of a Greek island. I was stunned by the beauty. What more could anyone want?

 

On that small island there were no cars. If you needed transportation you could enlist the help of a burro to get you up the surrounding hills. Leonard Cohen had   lived there with hsi muse, the inspiration for that great song Suzanne.

 

Daniel Klein, another old man, wrote a wonderful little book about a month he spent on the island. He called the book, Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in search of a Fulfilled Life. I highly recommend it, for everyone, but particularly old men.  It was given to me by one of my old law partners who  shamelessly avoided following the wise counsel offered in the book.

 

Early in the book Klein describes how, Aegean islanders like to tell a joke about a prosperous Green American who visits one of the islands on a vacation.  Out on a walk, the affluent Greek American comes upon an old Gentleman sitting on a rock, sipping a glass of ouzo and lazily staring at the sun setting into the sea. The American notices there are olive trees growing on the hills behind the old Greek but they are untended, with olives just dropping here and there onto the ground. He asks the old m an who the trees belong to.

 

“They’re mine,” the Greek replies.

“Don’t you gather the olives?” the old Greek asks.

“I just pick one when I want one” the old man says.

“But don’t you realize that if you pruned the trees and picked the olives at their peak, you could sell them? In America everybody is crazy about virgin olive oil, and they pay a dammed good price for it.”

“What would I do with the money? the old Greek asks.

“Why, you build yourself a house and hire servants to do everything for you.’

“And then what would I do?”

“You could do anything you want!”

“You mean, like sit outside and sip ouzo at sunset?”

 

I read this short passage to some friends of mine. One of them said, “If it rains I would rather sit inside this wonderful cabin I have built to keep out of the rain, rather than sit on a rock staring at the sun.”  “True,” I said, but you built it when you were young. Now you are old, you should enjoy what you have built. In rain or in sun. You have done the work, so enjoy the fruits of your labour. Stop striving for more. More, like perfection, is often the enemy of the good.

 

This to my mind sums up the Philosophy of the Greek philosopher Epicurus in a neat nutshell. The Old Greek man was content. He didn’t want to do the striving he did as a young man, to earn a living to support his life. He need not do that anymore. He could sit and drink ouzo and stare at the sunset, because that was what he wanted to do. Young men can’t do that; old men can. Young men must strive; old man have done it.

 

Been there. done that.

 

The MAGA King

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, Democracy, Extremism, Sunsets

 

 

 

While we were in Arizona, we also learned about threats of political violence on the right. Solomon Peña, who lost his 2022 run as a Republican for state House District 14 in New Mexico, was arrested by Albuquerque police and was accused of paying and conspiring with four men to shoot people at the homes of two state legislators and two county commissioners in December and January. Even though he lost the election in a landslide, echoing the words of his spiritual leader, he claimed the race was rigged. He also calls himself the “MAGA King.”  Fortunately, when he attended on site with  his not so trusty AR-15 jammed and he could “only” use a Glock, or more damage might have been done.

 

As CNN reported,

“The stewing of doubt about election veracity, principally among Republicans and usually without proof, has exploded nationwide since then-President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid and began propagating falsehoods that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The claims have stoked anger – and unapologetic threats of violence – against public officials down to the local level.”

 

Maggie Toulouse Oliver, Secretary of State for New Mexico understood what happened and put it this way: “This is how violent political rhetoric spills over into violent political action.” Peña had posted on social media that Oliver should be “hung in the town square.”

Such rhetoric is deeply troubling but increasingly American Republicans do not see it that way. Increasingly they see acts like this as justified attempts to overturn a Democratic Party coup.

It is clear that right-wing violence is on the rise in this country. It is certainly not dying out.

I am an inspector of sunsets

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Sunsets

I was hoping for a sunset. I am an inspector of sunsets much like Henry David Thoreau was an unofficial inspector of snow storms around Walden Pond. He wanted to explore well the area around him in Concord New Hampshire and I want to explore well the land around me in. San Tan Valley Arizona. The sunset was mostly a dud. It is impossible to predict when a great sunset will be produced by Mother Nature. The one essential, besides the sun, is clouds. But those clouds have to be just the right amount—not too much and not to sparse—and they must be like that at the right time. You need a Goldilocks moment.  And, of course, clouds move and shift in shape. To finding a classic sunset is more luck than brains.  Or perhaps someone with a lot more brains than I can be better at it than I am.

I wanted to photograph the sunset of course, but the most important part was the experience. If you are tired of sunsets, you are tired of life. John D. MacDonald that great writer of pulp fiction, now deceased, once said, that if sunsets occurred only once a year, we would be forced to declare a national holiday on that day.

This year I had a second reason to look for sunsets. I thought sunsets were a symbol of one of the things I wanted to learn about on this trip. I wanted to learn about western civilization, particularly in America and Canada, in decline. Are we in the sunset years of that civilization? Sometimes it seems that way. In fact, to me it seems that way more often than it used to. In fact, on this trip I found some shocking news about exactly that. I intend to blog about that. It amazed me how prescient my theme was.

I did capture a couple of images that pleased me. They showed the clouds reflecting the pink light.  Clouds reflecting the colour of the sun obscured by cloud in part but not completely, was the image I was after. I am a sucker for the blaze of colours in a sunset. And no two sunsets are the same.

Sometimes the light in the eastern sky is more interesting than the western sky. Sometimes the light is reflected back to the west where the sun is dropping. Today was like that. Again, sometimes the best sunset shows only the after glow in the eastern sky. Look around, you might be surprised. I was this sunset that I nearly passed by.

Finally, a true inspector of sunsets, like me, must always remember not to give up on sunsets too soon. Persistence is essential in the pursuit of sunsets. The best sunset is revealed after the sun is gone. You might be surprised. I was surprised today!

2023 Grand Finale Tour

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, New Attitude to Nature, Sunsets

This is the symbol of our trip?

 

I have started this trip with my wife Christiane at the end of 2022. We intend to spend about 3 & ½ months in Arizona and then tour a part of the Southeast United States. I intend to report in this blog on what I have “observed along the way”, to use a phrase my cousin Roy Vogt used to call his regular column in the Mennonite Mirror about 50 years ago. I loved that column; I loved that title.

 

I will comment on many things from many places depending on where my meanderings lead me.

I am calling this the “grand finale” tour. By that I don’t mean that this will be our last trip.  I sure hope it won’t be our last trip. Such words are too ominous. Yet, in many ways I feel that the world, along with me is at a sharp precipice. Some pundits have even spoken about being at the edge of the apocalypse. Is that possible?

Often the world seems under assault.  I have often called this the Age of Anger. Or the Age of Resentment. Both of those emotions seem to fill the air.  Who is assaulting this world? Not foreign invaders. At least not in Canada or the US, the two countries most relevant to this journey.  In Ukraine we know that this year Putin led a Russian invasion of that much smaller country. They certainly felt the sting of assault.

But we in North America don’t have reasonable fears of invasion.  Interplanetary invaders also don’t seem nearby.  So who should we fear? As cartoon character Pogo said, “I have seen the enemy and he is us!” That is indeed the preeminent attacker we must most fear. We are the enemy.

 I remember the first time I tried to watch YouTube a few years ago. I wondered what or who I should try to watch. For some entirely inexplicable reason I picked on Professor John Moriarty who taught English literature in 1967 at the University of Manitoba during  my first year of university. He was not even one of my professors. A friend of mine was his student. I was taught by another fine professor, namely, Professor Jack Woodbury. Both Professors were brilliant and we were impressionable.

I believe John Moriarty was a first year professor who quickly gained a substantial following of young students, particularly young women. He was a campus star, but as I recall, he only stayed 1 year or so at the University of Manitoba and left to go back to Europe. What a pity.

About 50 years later I decided to search for his name on the YouTube platform and was stunned to find an old lecture of his someone had been recorded and placed on the Internet. It was an astonishing find.  By then he had gone back to the United Kingdom and was teaching in either Ireland or England. I was not sure which country. There he was in front of me, through the magic of modern technology, and  bringing me back to the days of my youth.  They were grand times challenged by grand ideas. Those were the ideas of the 60s that will forever be with those of us who lived through those times. Many of those ideas had to be modified and rejected, but an important element has stuck with us. Thank goodness for that.

And there he was with the same long hair that was an essential part of the costume for us sixties radicals. And what was Professor Moriarty talking about? He was talking about us. Us the enemy. Just like Pogo! He called humans “a virus on the earth” like the aids virus.  Moriarty was speaking before Covid 19 or he might have likened us to that virus. Instead he likened our species to the Aids virus that attacked the world’s immune system. He said we humans are like a toxin on the earth. We are ravishing it.  And once again, I found it difficult to disagree with the Professor. We, led by a vicious cartel of capitalists, are relentlessly attacking nature.

There is a second and closely related theme I want to explore in a meandering fashion of course, on this Grand Finale Tour. That is the apparent serious decline of western civilization evidence for which seems ubiquitous.

By now we know clearly and irrevocably, that civilization requires a reasonably stable environment. And we don’t have that anymore. If nature as we know is destroyed, we could create a new civilization, but it would take millennia. These two ideas are therefore inextricably entwined.

To avoid civilizational collapse, we desperately need a new attitude to nature. We need to turn away from our destructive ways. We must cease to be the toxins of the earth, the careless predators of the earth, we must become the champions of a new way to work with nature, rather than against it.

At the same time, we must turn away from the current path on which our civilization seems to be on an inexorable decline. Those two paths are closely intertwined. By destroying nature we are destroying ourselves. Together, these two trends are leading us to our doom.  On this trip (and beyond) I want to explore those two important themes. I have always thought an important part of travel is to learn new things. We travel to learn and become different people. Not completely different, but significantly different. That is what knowledge does. It changes us.

By the expression ” the Grand Finale Tour” I don’t mean mean that in the sense of it being the end of life or nature or civilization. But I must admit such thoughts have entered my mind. Particularly of late.

I hope we have many more trips to come. But it is the finale of my legal career. I gave notice to the law firm SNJ where I worked for nearly 50 years that I would retire and withdraw from the practice of law on December 31, 2022. I did that  and now I can no longer practice law. Since then I am no longer a lawyer. I have simply devoted enough time to that career. It is time to move on.

Christiane and I have noticed that we are not getting better and stronger each year. Funny how that happens. Each year seem to be a bit of a step back. We are no longer the healthy vigorous people we once were and will never be again. That is life (and death). We must face that. We hope to have many adventures before we pack up our tents for good and hope to enjoy the journey until then, but the future is of course uncertain. We want to make the best of it. This journey is the start of that finale. But as I do that, I also want to take a hard look at this world in which we find ourselves. Can it be on the edge of doom? Why? What can we do about it? Where do we stand?

I have chosen the sunset as the symbol of the trip. I am in my sunset years. Yet there is some light left. It may be fading, but it is not gone. Not yet.

 

 

Inspecting Sunsets

photography, Sunsets, Winter

 

 

When the sunset begins I call it a whisper sunset. You just see a pale blush of sun if you look to the east or at least away from the sun.

 

At Buffalo Point for the New Year’s weekend I found employment of a sort. Henry David Thoreau, one of my heroes, claimed to be an inspector of snow storms when he lived at Walden Pond. That never appealed to me much but being an inspector of sunsets that was more like it.

 

 

 

So, I took up a self-appointed position as the inspector of sunsets. The sunset today was pretty good too.  I particularly like sunsets in winter when trees are reduced to their essential elements.

 

 

One thing I learned many years ago I think it was from Jim Peters or Dennis Fast at a photography workshop was that the best sunset photos don’t have the sun in them. The sun usually turns into a yellow blob in photos.  Best, usually, to keep it out of sight but look at its magnificent handywork.

I love sunsets.

Beauty where you least expect it

art, Sunsets, ,

I learned a valuable lesson this evening. Sometimes you have to look for beauty where you least expect it. I looked at the sunset and was disappointed it. It was a dud. But the eastern sky was a pastel rose/purple gem. I thought it was a gentle gem. It was almost too subtle for me. It was well worth photographing. This reminded me of a  line from another Bruce Cockburn song: “Spirits open to the thrust of grace.” You had to be open for the beauty or you would miss it.