One Sunset, One Life

Has the sunset ever hijacked your breath? Brought you to a place where radical red washed words away?

That’s what happened to poet Megan McDonough one August evening on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as she witnessed an extraordinary sunset at Campground Beach in Eastham. The experience, the felt sense of the sun leaving the sky, left an indelible mark.

With a simple iPhone in hand, and a heart full of tremendous gratitude for the beauty the sun so thoroughly threw out, Megan snapped picture after picture. She was mesmerized. Each moment, colors shifted, presenting a new Monet with every blink. She turned left, then right, then 360 degrees. Every part of the sky was different. Megan stood still, opening her peripheral vision and all her senses. She wanted to absorb, know, and be part of that whole before it disappeared.

This book tries to express that full-on, all-out embodied experience. All the pictures are from that one sunset, with no retouching or enhancing. The poem aims to get at the inner experience of seeing such a sight. In reading it, you get a felt sense of the whole that we are all a part of.

The words and pictures are merely shadows of the reality. Maybe, as humans, that’s the best we can do–experience the glorious truth and do our very best to translate it into our lives, each in our own quirky, imperfect way.

This sunset, like all sunsets, is one and done, never to be repeated. By savoring it, we are reminded to see each sunset, each moment of our lives, anew.