Landfall

I watched this cloud move across the setting sun on my final hike along the head land at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. At the time I was simply struck by its majesty. . . now I am more cognizant of its appetite; how it took out the sun and refused to relinquish it, and all the landscape was thrust into a sobering shadow.

One can accept more readily the shadow born of beauty, it is when the memory of the originating sublimity fades that darkness becomes just that. Then questions arise. And doubts. And we feel for a time what it is to be alone at the edge of something vast and hungry.