Figure 1 – Solstice Sunset at Malibu, (c) John Unfried 2013, and used with permission.

Reader Marilyn has been kind enough to send in this beautiful sunset  image taken on the night of the Winter Solstice.  The photograph was taken at the Malibu property of Eric Wright, who is the grandson of Frank Loyd Wright.  The picture was taken by Jim Unfried with his cell phone and he has granted permission for its use here.

I think that it complements the photograph that I took of the winter sunrise in Tampa last week and has the same sense of pensive foreboding and of precious winter light.  I am grateful to Marilyn for sending this in.  But I am grateful to her as well for taking me to Berkeley, CA forty years ago, to watch the sunset over the Pacific.  These are brilliant special moments, when the sun seems for an instant to hover suspended above the ocean and then is sucked into the sea.  You can almost hear it. Ever since that moment I have held that beautiful sight in my mind’s eye and today’s picture reminds me so gloriously of sunset.