A few months ago, I posted Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise”. In “Let Evening Come,” Kenyon offers yet another answer to the question of what it means to live a good life. Last time the word was “gratitude.” This time it’s “acceptance” — acceptance of the cycle of life, including the darkness that endlessly alternates with the light.

A younger friend once asked me how I felt about entering into my “sunset years.” It was evening and we could see the sun dropping below the horizon.

“Let me put it this way,” I said. “Given the hour, if that sun reversed course and began to rise, it would NOT be good news! In fact, it would be terrifying, a sign of The Apocalypse! As I enter my ‘sunset years,’ I’m glad for a chance to go along with the natural order of things.”

“Let Evening Come” reminds me that the sunset is not only natural. With it comes beauty in many forms — if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Let Evening Come
by Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

(Excerpted from Let Evening Come: Poems. Read the full poem here.)