The other night I went looking for a sunset. Around six o’clock, looking down on Loch Skene through the trees, I sat for 10
minutes watching the colour change, but it never went red. One of those
evenings when nature does its own thing just to put sightseers in their place!

And
an astonishing reminder that, for all our manufactured virtual realities, clever
illusions and obsession with appearance and image, we still can't do a nature
makeover, or airbrush a sunset. So I took a photo of an ordinary sunset, and
left it untouched, unedited and unimproved. How do you improve a sunset anyway?
At the centre of the photo there’s a little jewel of reflected gold, stretching
across the loch a mile away, leaving much to the imagination. But imagination helped towards
joy by the noise of hundreds of migrating geese, echoing up the hill, honking
their calls of home and home-going. Another reminder of nature's rhythms, which
are of course natural, and so far, mercifully, beyond our control!

“From
the rising of the sun and to the going down of the same, the Lord’s name is to
be praised.” And the greatest praise is gratitude, recognition of the gift that
is beauty, and life, and the blessings of a world threatened by a combination
of our cleverness and our foolishness. I took a photo of an ordinary sunset!
What an extraordinary thing to write – as if a sunset was ever other than a
familiar taken for granted miracle of Benediction!