Sunrises vs Sunsets

I was driving home from a jaunt down to Naples and then up through Sarasota. This little ride took more than a few hours and entailed a stop over in Sarasota for some Sam's Club shopping. What all that meant is that the sun was going down as I got within a few short miles of my house. And I was treated to beautiful sunset colors off to my left that slowly stretched across the sky. A sunset through the pines (we have a lot of pines in Florida) with the remains of storm clouds overhead is a symphony of colors from blues to pinks to reds to oranges with a multitude of hues in between. They are indescribable in mere words. Master painters struggle with their depictions (though they try mightily) and the photographs and movies fall somewhat short of the glory of a sunset. I was reminded of my mother's love of sunsets. She thought Florida had the most beautiful sunsets of all.

It isn't true. I have seen sunsets in many states of this country and in a few other countries. sunsets are, most of the time, simply the epitome of transient beauty. They are an evolving composition of color and emotion, which is what makes them so hard to describe, paint, or even capture in a photograph. They are rivaled only by sunrises. A sunrise is not simply a sunset in reverse. It has its own colors and emotions.

The environment has an effect on the beauty and its perception. As do the events prior to the time of each. I am especially partial to sunrises.


I was in Daytona Beach visiting a friend just before I entered the Navy when I witnessed a sunrise that I can conjure up mentally easily. Another friend and I had driven up the day before, arriving late in the evening. Of course we spent the next many hours talking and drinking as we went over old times and future plans. Before we realized it, it was dawn. My friend was living in a motel on the beach and we had been sitting facing the ocean while we talked and talked (and drank and drank). We went silent as the sky slowly transitioned from black to blue to orange to red and the ocean followed suit. The sun slowly rose above the horizon as we watched. There were clouds above the horizon whose base reflected all the colors. As the sun continued to rise and pass its equator, it began to elongate.... to stretch. And then it started to narrow at the middle. Still moving up, the "waist" of the sun grew narrower and narrower until it seemed that there were almost two suns connected by a thin, short, string of sunfire. And then they separated and there were two suns, one above the other for just a split second. At the same time, the colors danced in the sky above and around them.

It was only the effects of reflection on the ocean which was calm and silky. But the images are forever burned into my brain along with the emotions of friends facing separation for the first time seemingly permanent.

I had always loved sunrises, even before that morning, having watched a number of them over the ocean as I grew up in south Florida (and spent way too many nights roaming the beach overnight). But that one has never been rivaled by any I have seen since.

Sunrises or sunsets, no one paints as wondrous a scene as Mother Nature.