Honors students – those are the ones who can be found on Saturday evening in the library, working on their extra credit research paper, right? Well…maybe.
But you’re more likely to find this girl near dusk in another part of campus. To be honest, the location changes daily, but the goal is always the same – find the best seat in the house for the most spectacular show of the day: sunset.
I’ve always been a sunset kind of girl. Living in New Mexico for most of my life set high expectations for those solar curtain closers. But Texas does not disappoint. Possibly the best thing about Texas (minus the fact that people open doors for you everywhere you go) is the sky. I hate to submit to the “I told you so” factor, but the truth is, the sky really is bigger here.
Recently, the cloudy weather has endowed us spectators of the firmament with that perfect reflective sunset for which I’m always on the lookout. This has given me a new task for each day at dusk…sunset hunting. I’ve positioned myself in every building from Scharbauer to the Rec Center trying to get that unbeatable view. I’ve gone from low ground to rooftop to find the place where I should spend that picturesque moment that so dramatically and beautifully concludes every day.
However, after scouring campus for the best view of the vivid colors and warm glimmer of sunset, the perfect spot actually happened upon me yesterday evening. Time had gotten away from me, as it often does, and, laying on a hillside by the tennis courts, I looked up from the pages of my journal to see the sun’s breathtaking rays bidding farewell to another day in Fort Worth.
As I’m sure all my fellow sunset hunters know, sunsets are not ones to be captured digitally, but this picture conveys just a bit of the joyful revelation I had in the gloaming on Saturday evening. And thus I learned that the essence of sunsets is not in the adventure of hunting them down, but in experiencing them as an unforeseen blessing found in the peace of simply being still.
