Suburban Sublime…

I'm not ashamed to state that last night I unconditionally surrendered to pure gluttony… I'm talking about visual gluttony here, with a small side order of transcendental. Yesterday's sunset was one of the most exquisite & breathtaking we've had in a long time & I'm not talking about one of those smog-induced, blood-red summer sunsets we usually get around here. No indeed. An offshore tropical storm sucked a large, clear Canadian air mass through the Northeast, creating atmospheric conditions that would have most certainly inspired the nineteenth century American Sublime landscape painters ~ Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt & Sanford Gifford in particular. If one looked to the west (over a period of about 45 minutes) we went from this…

To this…

To this…

These photos do not come close to capturing the actual experience (nor does an ancient 3.5 megapixel Nikon Coolpix camera), but sometimes we have to settle for the best we can do with what we have at hand. The evening was capped off by a clear night sky with an almost full moon (full enough to cast shadows), a bright planet which may have been Venus & more stars than we usually see Back East in our severely light polluted skies. I didn't even bother to try & photograph the moon; it always looks so much smaller in photos. Sure, this all would have looked much more grand somewhere in Arcadia; perhaps the Catskills, or better yet the Rockies, but still…

One has to embrace the transcendent where one finds it. Particularly in suburbia.