Minnesota 14.6.93: Sweet Honey and Lilac Nimbus

Just north of Fergus Falls, Minnesota. It’s 9:30 P.M. An extraordinary sunset. We were listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock sing a love song, “Sometime,” and the sun began to move to the horizon, coming beneath the heavy cloud cover.

Through most of the state, it has been darkly overcast, with a strong northwest wind, cold and almost snowy looking. When the sun broke through clouds, the effect was indescribable. A strong rose glow where the sun itself was, but as we went downhill and lost the sun, a lilac, purple, mauve radiance thrown up onto the cloud cover, and shining in a nimbus over the hilltop, silhouetting dark firs, lighter deciduous trees, none of which every fully lost their green color.

This happened over and over as we mounted hills and drove down to vales. To say it was like one of those guidepost magazines one sees at Easter would be to cheapen it all. But In a way it was—although no photographers’ tricks here. It just was that way, air so pure it picked up and helped illuminate every ray of light.

Beside this, how trifling and even petulant all I wrote today in this journal. People fail one, but the land and the earth . . . . It makes me feel so still inside, the song, the sunset. I wept as I drove.

I try to understand, analyze (control) too much. I need just to let it be, to let it speak.

Yes, this is a time in my life, and I can’t evade it. But understanding it won’t save me, or make me do the “right” thing. And yes, in some sense my whole life is bound up in what I decide now, because playtime’s over—we live once and then die.

And yes, I’ve had a destiny laid on me which I barely comprehend.

But it must come to me, keep coming to me. I can’t make it happen, or happen my way, via some cheap magician’s trick. I have to place myself interiorly and exteriorly where it can come to me.