Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors

which it passes to a row of ancient trees.

You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,

one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

 

leaving you, not really belonging to either,

not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,

not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing

that returns to a star each night and climbs –

 

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)

your own life, timid and standing high and growing,

so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,

one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 – 1926

Many poems have used the image of a sunset to mark the end of the day and all the implied meanings that can contain such as death, loss or closure. Rilke’s sunset is giving a new wardrobe of colors to the world. This sunset is precariously balanced on the horizon between two dimensions that are inextricably intertwined.  Straddling the worlds of the sacred and profane, the sun becomes symbolic of the soul itself – on one hand the soul is the occupant of the earthly house of existence, and on the other an evolving star stretching forth towards the darkness of eternity. We live within this dynamic duality, at once timid and yearning. How to balance this seesaw of existence?