Pick A Color

I woke up in a dead sweat even though the fan was blowing the hot air around on my boat and the Florida sun hadn’t yet ripped through the morning darkness with its exploding loudness of color, dressing the clouds of the eastern ocean horizon in a blazing, almost surreal outburst of color. The Earth’s inevitable rotation hadn’t yet brought light around to eastern daylight savings time of America, but that would only bring more heat on the downside, but on the upside there would be another famous Florida sunrise.

It always started with minimal changes to the darkness of the eastern horizon. Just little tinges of gray would start rendering the sky with changes that equated to throwing shadows of light, shone through dirty bathwater, on a black slate, leaving it lightened ever so slightly. The ever-so-slightly lessened black patina of the sky will follow the mornings of past millennia and continue shedding the black like a very thin pool of oil sliding off a pane of glass.

On clear mornings, rays of light will start to peek through the edge of the horizon as if the ocean was spitting up color in little pinpoints of light until the sky showed a faded blue. The pinpoints, all from an epicenter of burgeoning color, would begin to seep into the darkness. The darkness would ebb into the day, bringing color that screamed good morning and hey, look what I have brought you.

What the morning will bring is the heat and humidity, making your clothes feel heavy and sticky, but if you’re up and sitting on the beach, it’s an “E” ticket ride to peace. It’s strange that such a blazing, colorful burst of the earth’s madness in all its magnificence could make your spirit quieten.

But it does.

If you take it all in, pinpoint to explosion, and if you see it for what it is, a gift from this earth like few others of its type, you can dwell on it quietly. You can watch the conundrum of clouds moving, actual tons of moisture, moving at surprisingly high speeds across a stage so momentous it makes them seem to be moving slowly.

But you don’t think about it like that.

You can absorb the scene as the conundrum of the night’s darkness, surrendering the sky to the nascent army of color rambling over the horizon in its battalions of varying hues, painting the sky with broad strokes, thin strokes, dots, and splashes of the earth’s gifts.

But those are the loud thoughts that bring quiet thoughts.

You can weigh the conundrum of how it all happens. How the sun starts its daily journey into our lives, with the sun reflecting off a dirty sky. You can ponder how those reflections are amazing in their river of unpredictable beauty, their range, their exquisiteness. You can think about how those tiny particles of dirt coerce a wide palette across the sky like a box of crayons had somehow been spewed in a wide swath of color that could only be created by this earth and sky.

But it’s an absorption of it all that brings the peace. It’s the sky drawn in pigments only our creator could give us. The colors themselves shape the moment, the silence of the world being shut out, and the peace that’s brought.

The heat had awakened me, so I got up, showered, dressed, and grabbed my camera. I know sunrise and sunset pictures are almost cliché, especially here in Florida. The definition of cliché is that something has been used so many times, it defies the need for thought.

I’m good with that.

Each of them is, however, original, as if they were the earth’s fingerprint. The ridges, the valleys, cores, deltas, and minutiae forming our own fingerprints are analogous to the swathes that form the sunrises’ and sunsets’ unique artistry, served to us with each magnificent show in its version of loops, whorls, and arches. I love the uniqueness.

While the colors are generally the same overall, the tints, the hues of each blue, each magenta, each orange, and each pink paint like no other artist can. Painting after painting attempts to explain with each stroke this magnificence, and some can show the foundation, but few capture the structure itself in full. I imagine many a brilliant artist made that long transition from vision to mind, then to canvas, and the proliferation of sunrise and sunset paintings is proof, but nothing captures its beauty like that of the camera lens.

While the sight through the lens can be manipulated in its travels to its final life, for better or worse, its beauty is something you can’t fight, short of just turning away and forgetting what an incredible part of life it can be.

It can bring peace, and does if you let it.

Being a photographer is interesting in its many components. One of my favorite instructors told me about having a photographer’s eye and how it is like the many facets of a stone. Most of us have heard of the artist’s eye, and the photographer’s eye is just a variation of that particular attribute. The thing that made a distinct impact on me from Mr. Brown’s instruction was when he said the more you shoot, the more your eye develops. I have two things going for me as blessings when it comes to my artist’s eye. I believe I can write well, and I can shoot pictures quite well, and while that may not come from anything more than repetition, I like to think talent falls in there somewhere.

It makes sense, of course, but I never thought of it before in those specific terms. I thought it was something you either had or didn’t have. I just thought of it in terms of either having a talent or not. But he was right, it develops just like any other talent. Just like polishing a facet of a gem, it gets better and shinier. It’s not like practice doesn’t make an athlete better and better, after all. Right? Photography seems to work that way as well.

I’ve been shooting sunrises and sunsets for five decades now. They have varied from many hues of greens, some that glow like emeralds in exploding greens, to subtle forest colors. There have been those that dominated the sky with royal blues flowing to reds that deepen and flow into magentas and yellows surrounded by oranges burning the sky. The colors couldn’t be created in any other form. They are not only unique as a fingerprint in their very existence, they are also unique because they simply can’t be replicated in any other medium. Sure, photography comes close, but there will always be an absorption of some of the light through the lens. There will always be some change, however minute it may be, and that slight variance will never meet the gold standard of viewing it as it proceeds through its short-lived metamorphosis into the day.

I can be moved by a great sunrise or sunset picture, but it’s nothing like sitting there watching colors change in beauty you can almost taste and smell. It’s a feeling that can open the gates of heaven at a time when you’ve been facing the portals of hell.

I am a practicing Buddhist, I guess you’d say. Not a great one, I still have a few temper issues, but I am one that certainly believes in the tenets of the belief. I’ve never reached nirvana, and even the whole meditation thing seems to evade me, no matter how hard I try. I’ve never been able to shut out the world completely and be in that state of pure peace they say that comes with deep, clear meditation. I wish it too was like something that could be developed the more you practice, and I’m sure that for some it most likely is, but my old hard head is what it is.

I may not reach meditation or nirvana in my lifetime. That may never be a talent I possess or can develop into some usefulness in my life, but what I do possess is a mountain of memories from thousands of pictures of peace.

Peace, that just like the pics, no one can take that from me.