In The Twilight

 Lake Vermillion, Minnesota

 In our lifetime most of us have had the opportunity to meet many people, and to experience many things, including the swiftness of life. 

We have suffered the pains, and reveled in the joys of life. For most, our passions and our exploits are known in many cases only to ourselves, or those close to us. Who can know how struck we were with a sunset, the very first time we saw one? Unless we tell, who can know our wonder at our first kiss, our first embrace? Even the difference from the first one and the one that meant the most to us, that means the most to us?

All the intimate moments in a life, the collective loveliness of an existence,are bound only by the way we remember it, how we saw it.

Each life is a manuscript of living, breathing, dreaming and reality. Pain and sorrow, are burdens that most humans will carry at some point. Hollow genuflection to kings and idols might take place too. In the essence of each of us, we carry all the tools to begin a smile, to shed a tear, and to form an existence.

As we rocket through our time, we sometimes do not see all the nuances that make us, we sometimes do not acknowledge the possibility that we are raw clay and we have been in some ways molded. We are. We are spun into something that is a product of our origins, our families, our mentors and tormentors. Along the way we are taught and we teach. We meld into one being and yet grow continually. Do you ever wonder that our existence must end? Do we somehow become too filled up?

While the sun was setting this summer on Lake Vermillion, I was recounting how many times I had seen it there, and realizing that perhaps it had not been enough, I began to furiously snap pictures of it as it waned. Why had I done this? To recall it's beauty, to know at some level that I may not return, to acknowledge it's influence on my life?

In all of it, I am grateful. I spent my honeymoon there and I took my family there. I gave this sunset to my husband for our 25th anniversary. I could have gone other places, but going anywhere else would not make the point, I was showing my love and gratitude for a good man, a good marriage. He loves this place.

It is not hard to think of things to be thankful for at Thanksgiving. If you sat down right now, you could write a list. Even in the most difficult situations, there is something. I watch people in the habit of missing what they once had, who they once had, sometimes with great and terrible sadness. I can appreciate what they are thinking, but I also know that having that, even though it is gone, might have been better than never having it. There is an opportunity to be thankful.  Thankful to have known that person, thankful to have loved them, thankful to have had the opportunity of that job, or whatever it was now gone. In the end, we are the sum of many parts, the being which evolves from experience and can only embrace change. We cannot control the outcomes of our lives anymore than we can control the sunsets in them. We can only look upon one, and appreciate it in the moment of its revelry.

Copyright 2011 by SheilaTGTG55