Sunset | Contemplative Inquiry

August 22, 2025

LATE AUGUST 2025: SETTLING INTO AUTUMN

It is evening and for me autumnal. The sky offers the water a soft light, seemingly pink and grey. The water reflects this back, adding its own hint of mist. It is a tranquil scene.

For the first time this year, I feel a tug towards the Equinox, just under a month away. These canal waters are gentle, but they are drawn from the River Severn, site of the Severn Bore (1). Perhaps the waters are nudging something – maybe the water – in me.

A little later, facing into the declining sun (below) I see the sunset and its effects. I notice the concentrated power of the orb as it appears to reach the earth, and the way in which this energy disperses into the sky. The colour coding shifts from intense white to yellow to red-orange to an orange becoming increasingly grey. I live at latitude 52 north, and the sunset is getting earlier every day, now 8.15pm. Another autumnal feature.

Autumn is also the season of the fruit harvest. This year, many people are commenting that the fruit harvest is arriving early. Below, against the background of a clear blue daytime sky, an apple tree is fruiting. The tree is close to Gloucester Cathedral and may belong to it. Medieval Gloucester was a place of churches and priories. It was also a place of orchards, many of them cultivated by monks and friars. The picture points to natural and cultural continuity, though the fruit are early this year. I am no longer at a point tension between seasons. I am already settled in autumn.

(1) The Severn Bore is a natural tide phenomenon occurring in the River Severn in England, where a large wave surges upstream. It’s caused by the Atlantic tide pushing into the Bristol Channel and funneling it into the narrowing Severn Estuary, creating a more powerful wave that can be up to two meters high and a speed of up to 21 km/h. The Bore travels up the Severn Estuary, from Awre to Gloucester, a distance of 25 miles. It is strongest in the equinoxes (especially spring) and a popular challenge for surfers, kayakers and paddleboarders.

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September 17, 2024

POEM: AT THE BEGINNING OF SUNSET

Looking out

from my apparently restricted life

I see the wide world,

expectant.

It is the beginning of sunset,

a critical moment

in the wheel of the day.

Facing east,

I have the sun behind me

still with some warmth –

but on the brink

(I know)

of accelerated descent.

My eastward vision embraces

pale blue sky

pink clouds

wooded hills,

and a residue of sunlight

on the majestic hornbeam

whose leaves have begun to turn.

Early autumn, early evening:

a whole world in seeming suspension

between one state and another.

The wheel turns

through both day and year.

States are not fixed

at any point in time.

Yet to notice the moment

with softened heart

and strengthened sight

makes that moment eternal.

Looking out

from my apparently restricted life,

I see the wide world,

expectant.

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August 24, 2024

SUNSET SKYSCAPE

After a grey and stormy day came a grey and calm sunset. Facing west, I looked up at the sky. I began to contemplate the clouds and the muted influence of the sun.

As this skyscape became my world, the solid earth became a distant rumour. Physical reality became porous, indefinite, and insubstantial. Dissolving into this space, I briefly became part of it, no longer an external observer. This experience was fleeting in time-bound reality but imprinted itself on my memory.

Then a seagull seemed to emerge out of nowhere, a dynamic edge of creative light shimmering about its newly-minted form. For me this moment was both grey and luminous, filled with subtle light.

The bird embodied a tremendous joy in flying, with an elegance not seen on the roof tops or the ground. It flew fast and I didn’t see it for long. After its disappearance I noticed how easy it was to enjoy a grey sunset that I might otherwise call gloomy.

Every year is unique and I wondered, then, whether the summer of 2024 was breaking up early in my neighbourhood. As I write, on a rainy morning two days later, this remains an open question.

The wheel continues to turn, and I find myself turning to the west, leaning into autumn, embracing this season for what it uniquely is. It is much more than a precursor to winter. Autumn has tended to be my favourite season and the one I find the most conducive to contemplative and visionary states.

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February 16, 2023

AFTER SUNSET

The light is draining from the sky with its subtle reds and greys. The hills, not quite reduced to silhouette, watch over the town. The houses and urban trees seem darker and my eye is drawn to an arch of artificial light. I continue to enjoy the spacious outlook from my new home. But I’m also in an odd liminal mood, with a pervasive sense of unknowing.

I drew a (Druidcraft) tarot card for the first time in a month. This was a single card, to illustrate something about myself within this space. I was given the Hanged Man.

The Hanged Man is bound and upside down – helpless and vulnerable. He does not appear to be suffering, but serenely awaiting a consequential event – a death, a birth, perhaps both. In the Druidcraft Tarot he is the initiate, suspended on the world tree, surrendered to the rhythms of life. The Tree unites the three worlds and. now one with the Tree, the Hanged Man has the capacity to travel freely between them. His seed has become the mistletoe that will be cut with the golden sickle “to symbolise the entry of the Divine Life into the world” (1).

When I draw the card my responses are less mythologised. I am settling in a new home, a place that I want to be in, with a partner I want to be with. It’s a story of renewal. It’s also a time when physic energy is being withdrawn from preoccupation with the project of moving. This energy is available for other dimensions of experience. Perhaps the ‘after sunset’ dimension is one of them. But what, specifically, is emerging I cannot yet sense, or intuit, or divine. All I can do is watch and wait, sensitive to experience, and my responses to experience, as they arise.

It seems that my task in this extended moment is to remain awake, engaged, passive and vulnerable at the same time. This is my lesson, at this time, from the card.

(1) Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The DruidCraft Tarot: Use the Magic of Wicca and Druidry to Guide Your Life London: Connections, 2004 (Illustrated by Will Worthington)

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August 4, 2022

THE GATEWAY TO TWILIGHT

High summer becomes late summer, in my world, with a gentle movement into the evening of the year. In the picture above, taken a little after 8 pm, I at first feel, as much as see, a suggestion of muting light. On looking up, the blue of the sky seems influenced by a subtle greying effect that is independent of the clouds. Looking down, the buildings are shadowy and their reflections in the water are set within a gathering darkness.

The picture below was taken at 9 pm on the following day. The grey in the sky owes everything to clouds, whereas the orange and yellow are connected to sunset. The latter is reflected in the water, and electric lighting is now also present. The day is changing, but not yet into night. This is an in-between time, twilight. It is its own, extended moment, quietly shifting in the physical world, profoundly influential in my psychic world.

I feel joy with an edge of melancholy. It is a familiar feeling that stretches deeply into my early life, prior to language, older than memory itself. It seems to come from deep time, and to be pre-personal, not just about ‘me’. I am any finite being, moving from day towards night, from summer towards winter, from life towards death. Having shifted decisively away from the zenith, I find myself, for now, in a beautiful moment. The Gloucester docks provide me with a magical space for walking, standing still, experiencing and recording this time.

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Tag: Sunset