Mornings. The air is heavy with possibility and potential, indeed countless things are possible on any given day. Then, after a few hours the sun rises higher and the list dwindles until only routine is left. In the morning the world is reborn, animals awaken and shake the sleep from their tired limbs, frost melts from the trees and fields, and the cold mists of evening lie heavy in the valleys both obscuring and embracing the river banks and lakeshores
and thus extending the night that much longer. My best days come from watching the sunrise, to greet the day with that first fiery burst of crimson crests the horizon. I remember being able to catch the sunrise every morning for nearly a month, it was down by the sea on Hatteras Island where I lived and worked for a time.
The day would begin dark and blue, deep in the southern pines that surrounded my home. I would run down the road then, looking at the blue mist between the trees, choked with trailing vines and greenbriar.
Making my way out on the elevated abandoned road above the salt marsh, I would watch as herons and egrets strode sleepily about, looking for fish among the rushes. Cresting the low dune line, I would kick off my shoes man make a beeline for the surf, still the color of night burnished silver, with the faintest semicircle of gold attesting to where the sun would soon appear. This gold would grow into blazing red and I would stop my run along the beach and sit back on the hard sand to watch. For a few moments, the sun would be visible below the water, like a great shining behemoth lurking beneath the waves, and then the thinnest sliver of molten gold would break the surface as Apollo’s chariot climbed slowly from the sea, illuminating the sand, the breakers, and the tall shimmering dunegrass with a strange and beautiful light.
Every morning for a month my day began thus, to watch all of the glory of our neighboring star burst shining from the ocean each morning was a unique and special gift. I believe that few of us realize the magic of the sunrise, and only by virtue of its repetition are we desensitized to it.
