The Lower Rim Of Beauty

Late last week and late in the day I was driving home from town.

Driving on auto-pilot and lost in a world of deep thoughts, I was only a few minutes from the house when something in the sky unexpectedly pulled me out of my introspection.

That something was color.  Lots of color.

Still slowly driving on rutted out gravel road, I looked more closely at the sky around me. 

There was much blue still remaining in the sky but it was a stunning shade of blue that I had never ever seen before.

In addition to new-blue, the sky was filled with shades of pink and purple in the east and in the west was a huge orange and black cloud that seemed to cover the entire bowl-surrounded-by-mountains in which we live.

For a split second I considered pulling the truck over to the side of the road so that I could take pictures of this most unusual and beautiful sky, but quickly thought better of it.

I was only a couple of minutes from home and instantly decided that as soon as I arrived I would wander and take pictures from the yard.................

Still intensely focused on the sky, I pulled into the driveway and found LC and my neighbor both standing on the porch.

They were both looking up and pointing, and as I climbed out of my truck they both excitedly called to me, asking if I had seen the sky.

Yes.  I had.  I smiled as we all three looked around us in amazement.

My elderly neighbor has been in Wyoming since the early 1990's and as she continued to point and laugh and exclaim delight, she told us that she had never seen a sky that looked like this one.

Neither had I.

I have seen many beautiful sunsets in many states and in many countries, but this was...........different.

The blue was so strange.  The pink and purple was beautiful but not inordinate.  But the orange cloud.........now THAT was different.

I am not sure why (possibly my upbringing of eagerly devouring all things sci-fi and Twilight Zone-ish - possibly my dark state of mind - probably a combination of both) but the overwhelmingly huge cloud looked beautiful and ominous at the same time, and I wandered away from LC and my neighbor to take the sight in alone.............

There was no way my cheap and little digital camera could capture the magnitude of this cloud.

I alternated snapping pictures, feeling slightly frustrated that my camera could not possibly do this sight justice, and dropping my camera down to the side of me as I looked up into the sky.

Just as I looked at rocks in Yellowstone and saw a living and powerful entity, so it was with this cloud................

The world to the west was orange.

The world to the south and east was a growing intensity of blue and pink..................

All of these pictures were taken behind the house and along the road close to the house.............

Tonight the sun has died like an Emperor ... great scarlet arcs of silk ... saffron ... green ... crimson ... and the blaze of Venus to remind one of the absolute and the infinite ... and along the lower rim of beauty lay the hard harsh line of the hills ..............John Coldstream, Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters