sunsets – The woman on the mountain

Crescent cloud

December 9, 2009 by Fred Baker

crescent-1 Clouds never cease to surprise me with their inventiveness, their capacity to confuse the senses and scramble their connections to the mind.

In one almost cloudless sunset sky recently, at a time when I thought I knew the moon was half-full, I briefly also thought I saw a huge crescent moon.

Pink and perfect, it made me look twice and it made me rapidly sift through my frequently addled brain to check what sort of moon I had seen last night — if I had seen one.

A matter of seconds, but how refreshing to be challenged yet again by nature and its unpredictability.

Sunset moon

January 13, 2008 by Fred Baker

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mountain sunset My last full moon teamed up with the sun for a brief pas de deux between their respective acts.

To my north-east, the soft pinks and blues of a reflected sunset are always more delicate than the vibrant western reality, but this time the former won my attention, with a pearl of a moon rising above a long low cloud bank over the mountains.

Until the final curtain fell, the changing light was the most evident feature, with my foreground garden and forest turning to black, demanding the flash on my camera, while on the far stage the blues intensified and the pinks flushed dark rose and lilac before reaching for the deep purple of late twilight.

Through all this light and colour action the moon simply stayed where she was, steadily gaining a more luminous prominence, biding her time until the sun would have finished its flamboyant exit display — and it would be her stage alone, with no light but her own.

To the west the sun’s act always lasts longer, bolder and brighter — but it cannot ever dance with the moon.

My last picture shows the ‘real’ sunset.

Peeping through my fingers Glimpses of childhood, old age – and the dangerous bits in between.
A linked collection of my fictional short stories, funny or poignant, but always perceptive, imagined from observations of my fellow humans in our hopeful stumble through life.

Rich Land, Wasteland — How coal is killing Australia. Exposing the facts behind the spin, sharing true stories of the long term negative impacts of the coal and gas invasion, from broken rivers to broken hearts.

The Woman on the Mountain A candid meander through my life on my remote mountain wildlife refuge, answering the oft-asked question of ‘Why do you live way out there’? – and how I became such a weird woman as to want to!

Mountain Tails Illustrated tales for animal lovers about the wild creatures who allowed me to share their living space — and a plea to look after them before it's too late.