Grasping for the Light at the End of the Day

As I was walking to the library this evening the air was cooler than yesterday at the same time.  We had a brief but heavy thundershower early and it seemed to have both lowered the temperature and wrung the moisture out of the air. My passing through the neighborhood came at about 8:25 PM. Part way on my eight minute walk I caught a glimpse of light playing upon a stop sign. The angle of the sun illuminated the stop sign creating an almost aura like effort around the red and white octagon.

Quickly, well almost immediately I pulled out my phone. Over a minute I took a good 8 to 10 photographs of the glowing stop sign. One can never catch the golden light at the end of the day. Me, I try and I try but it never works out. Sometimes I get just a hint of what the reality of what I saw was. Sometimes if you play with the filters in the phone might get 80% of the way there. But the crucial thing is you never get there.

Know this there is no program on any phone, nor any computer, which will actually grab what your eye sees.  Nothing will ever capture the image on your retina perfectly.  Nothing will ever record it perfectly. I think that reality is why we should live life without any anxiety about the historical record, about memorializing the things we see in our passages. There is beauty that we can observe on an individual basis and individually is the only way we can observe it. What I think is incredibly important is that we try and catch the light at the end of the day.