Superior Sunset

I've always loved liminal moments and threshold places, but find I have a special affinity for them now, and that may have something to do with the fact that I am moving into my elder years and a liminal time in my own life. Sunsets are a great pleasure, and wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I pause in my thoughts and activities and step outside to to watch the sun go down. On nights when a glorious sunset is attended by an an equally glorious moonrise, there is magic all around, and the air is filled with a vast thrumming indefinable mystery.

This is not the Lanark Highlands, but a wild rocky place which is equally dear to me, and one I go back to frequently in late afternoon woolgathering and nighttime dreams. The rocky north shore of Lake Superior was known as "Algoma country" long before Tom Thomson and later the members of the Group of Seven put up their easels there in the early 1900's and took out their paints.

There is a wealth of paintings "out there" which depict sunsets on Lake Superior's rocky shores, and that is not surprising, for there is absolutely nothing on this island earth like an Algoma sunset. The setting sun goes down over the great inland sea like a ball of fire: it flames over the icy northern waves, it caresses the islands way out in the lake, dances over the Sibley peninsula (which my ancestors named "the Sleeping Giant"), and it plays on the great weathered rocks nearby - it lingers in the shallow pools along the shoreline, and (here) on one thoughtful and very contented observer.

From my present and far off place, I feel the remembered warmth of the setting sun on northern Lake Superior and hear the waves hitting the shore. I pull my cloak more closely around me and remember how bitterly cold the wind was, how haunting its song. I remember the burnished perfection of the slowly ebbing light.