Back to a different world

Hello.
Want to know something ironic? I wrote this post already, and then lost it.
Shows you how long I've been away from blogs!
Yes - I used to have a blog, for many years in fact. It was fairly successful - it accomplished what I wanted it to. I used it to express myself: life lessons I've learned, philosophical questions, news on myself, humorous anticdotes, and even *gasp* the occassional survey.
And then I stopped. For a myriad of personal reasons. I stopped for several years, and it was good not to be tempted to use only an online medium to express myself.
I don't want to sound overly morbid, but these things can be dangerous ;-) Or maybe just to me.

So why am I back? I'm not even really sure myself. I just know I need to be back right now. I'm one of those "english majors at heart" who simply likes writting things down, organizing them in a visual pattern. Editing if need be, but usually not.

Have you ever watched the sun set while walking? Whom am I kidding, of course you have! I get to see it every weekday evening as I walk home from work - I'm traveling westward, so I get the full view of it for as long as it lasts.
The colours always amaze me. Perhaps its the painter in me, but the sheer depth and vibrence of the oranges, pinks, purples, and every other tone is superb and unrecreateable.
I was working on an environmental reconstruction project not long ago, and got sidetracked with paleo-air quality. We can measure this due to the annual record of the arctic ice cores: quite often we find gass bubbles within the ice, which contain samples of actual atmosphere from the time. Did you know why the colours of the sunset are there?
It's from polution. Now I'm a bit of a green guy myself, and I've never been a fan of polution, especially over the industrial revolution. But it is because of those different particles in the atmosphere that we have the amazing colour show every night, as the earth turns away from the sun.
Kinda odd? Think about it this way: our ancestors all over the globe, say a thousand years ago, never experienced a sunset like those we take for granted. Those oranges, purples, pinks - gone, or at least only vaguely present. Predominantly, all that was present in a paleo-sunset was blue. Shades of blue, going to almost white with the position of the sun on the horizon.
I for one, feel almost honoured to be able to see such a show of intense and beautiful colours every evening. We all know that we live in a harsh, unrelenting world - we've all experienced the trials of existence. But I believe that we live in a universe that at its core is good and pure, and goverend by fair laws. Laws that can take even our worst mistakes, and make something beautiful out of it.
Of course we still have global warming, poor air quality killing life, messed up oceanic flows and the like, but that's pretty much what we deserve anyway. But the sunsets? We don't deserve that.

I like to think that even as this applies on the grander scale, it also applies in my own personal life: that every mistake can be used for good somewhere. It's part of what keeps me going.

Not every cloud has a silver lining - but how it explodes in colour when the sun hits it in the evening!