“We Live in an Old Chaos of the Sun”

Since childhood, I have always tried to hold on to the beautiful, passing days, only to have them slip through my fingers as dusk came too soon. The grasses turn to old gold, then black at night and back to green, and new gold again at dawn. This photograph reminds me of all the sunsets on all the marshes I have stood before in rapture. It is an image that goes to the source of what I am. It was taken at Fall Creek, outside Lowell, Oregon. Here, the rushing creek enters the lakebed across a long delta.

The title comes from a poem by Wallace Stevens called “Sunday Morning.” It is a wonderful poem about religion, the natural world, the afterlife, and what happiness there is to be derived from life. These are the final lines:

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.