That strangest of all strange days had really started on the evening before.
I had been sitting on a clean hilltop at the edge of Yuma, Arizona, watching a blazing sunset paint the sky in flaming glory. At my back the Colorado River was murmuring its mysterious complaints to the evening hush. It was complaining at the banks for crowding it in. It was grumbling about its weakened condition because men had so often dammed its course. It murmured about its weariness as it recalled in a hazy sort of way the long, lonely miles it had traveled in its life-time as it journeyed onward toward the sea. It grumbled and murmured to itself like one grown very old, who forgets, mayhap, that he is not alone. Each mile had been a year, and its journey a lifetime. It was much closer to its journey's end than it realized for its heaven of rest was very close -- very close indeed.
But I was not turned toward the river, nor listening to its complaints, nor giving ear to its wandering reminiscences of its dancing, frolicking, sparkling childhood.
I was as absorbed in my own thoughts as was the river in his.
I sat watching the sky, aflame with splendor. And my mind was following the fiery footstep of the sunset in its eternal rounds as it circled the earth.
I yearned for a plane that would travel at just the right speed to keep that sunset before me for at least one full, twenty-four hour span. I was viewing with new eyes the breathtaking wonder of the sunset eternal -- the sunset that is always and forever and forever -- the eternal sunset shaking out its blazing blankets to bed down the earth where day goes tiptoeing out. It was the never-ending sunset that I was really seeing for the first time, not just the minute portion of it before me, holding its place for a fleeting moment. I was viewing in my mind that never ending sunset that goes on and on, winging its way in its eternal rounds as it keeps stride with the sun, circling the earth forever and forever, without stopping, without ending. The breathtaking wonder of there always being a sunset upon some area of the globe struck me for the first time. Above and through the clouds, across the seas, over the mountains, along the desert sands, always and forever the sunset -- never ending.
And always and forever the dawn preceding the sun -- the dawn rolling back the blankets to awaken the day.
Thus the dawn, the day, the sunset, the night, each following the other in their eternal rounds of never-ending existence, circling the earth in their ever rotating journey. They each exist completely and fully at all times, together, yet individually apart. The dawn and the sunset perhaps are but the soft kisses, or the delicate handclasp between the night and day -- their meeting place of lingering caress.
Always somewhere is the day, somewhere the night; and somewhere the day and twilight holding them together in a loving, momentary, breathtaking caress of ecstasy.
It may not be new days, as we have thought, blossoming forth with each dawn, but the same eternal day over and over, returned to give us one more chance to try again -- and yet again. If we could but lift ourselves high enough to gain the great perspective who knows but what we might find that time is not; that it has never been. It could be quite possible that yesterday, today, tomorrow and all time is but one -- eternity in its eternal rounds.
These thoughts turned my meandering mind backward to my mother and the difficulty of the life she lived. I recalled that in my maturing youth I had thought how utterly impossible my mother's life seemed to me. I knew that I could not live a life like hers, not in a million years, I couldn't. Her life, to my mind contained everything that was undesirable and impossible. And then, even in my youth, I had somehow been given the understanding that if I had lived my mother's life it would not have been as my mother lived it, but as I would live it, therefore, it would not be her life at all, but mine. And it is possible that we were each living the same life, she in her way, I in mine. I knew as I watched that sunset that my life would have been as impossible for my mother to have lived as hers would have been for me. We each had to express life in our own way, with our own equipment or lack of it, and according to the vision in our souls.
Such had been a portion of my thinking as I had waited for the sunset to turn its back and usher in the early evening stars, for there was a deep purpose in my being there on the desert sands at dusk. It was a feeling which contained the whole purpose and meaning of what had been -- and what would be.