How many sunrises and sunsets have I witnessed across the span of so many years? Does it matter the number? What matters more is that I have been truly present with all of my senses opened and engaged in those moments of such transcendent splendor.

To begin and conclude each day by allowing myself to be swept up in the contemplations of these twice daily solar events seems a highly fitting thing to do. They become a time of prayerful reverence set aside to rejoice in the manifestation of divine creativity at its most glorious.

It’s as though at these seminal moments nature strives to capture our full attention in order to accentuate the joyful exuberance of which she is capable.

Take a child set loose in an artist’s studio, she splashes an assortment of colors across the sky. At times its as though a pyromaniac set the clouds themselves on fire.

Unlike the stable canvas of an earthly artist, natures colors flow and blend, shift and shift again, so that from one moment to the next the scene is never the same. One moment the sky is filled with a golden light. The next moment the light is orange or scarlet and blended in are shades of blue, purple, pink and even green.

She’s prolific in her creativity is our celestial artist. She cares not a fig if the colors at times seem to clash. Its color in all its variations that intoxicate her, but in the end the colors slowly fade until there is nothing left but a few dying embers.

The whole thing is more than art on a canvas. It is a full scale production from beginning to end and no two renditions are ever the same. Nature does not repeat herself. She’s far too creative to rely on repetition.

So that today’s sunset will not be a repeat of yesterday’s or last years. Nature takes great pleasure in striving for uniqueness in all that she does. Whether it is snow flakes or human finger prints, it is originality that is her calling card, her signature. It keeps us on our most alert so that we cannot ignore or take for granted any part of nature’s great symphony.

In her flamboyance she never worries about whether or not she is coloring between the lines. In her unbridled enthusiasm there exists a lesson we all might emulate.