It’s too soon to find them in bloom. They’re mostly two feet tall at best, thus far, and not nearly ready to flower. And the sky is overcast today. Quite grey and a little bit dark. Any sunflowers would be hard pressed to find the sun and smile at it.
The thing about sunflowers is, they believe in the sun even when it’s not visible. I do, too.
Morning doesn’t always bring peace. Sorrow may linger, grief that is not wiped away by night or sleep or even tears.
Beauty, though, can help approximate the sense of peace, help me to recollect a meditative, even if it’s melancholy, calm. This, too, brings some small measure of what I remember as true peace, and lets me know that the capacity remains. In possibility is hope. In hope is rest. In rest, I can let go, if just for now, the troubles of the hour.
A cloudless dawn has its own quiet way of pouring out benevolence that, if not cure, brings respite of a kind and momentarily distracts the heart from its dull void. At the morning’s break, low-lying mist pools, thick and velvety, swirling so slowly in its densely silver gleam, it seems to be a lake–indeed, a mystic lake where it would be no great surprise to see that shimmering arm emerge that bears Excalibur.
Along the horizon creeps that cottony blue, transforming first to palest violet, then rose, then saturated orange, and finally, shooting sun-flares so bright and dazzling they blind when they reflect from glass sky scraper walls, pillars of wholly molten gold blazing beacon-sharp against the now bright-cobalt sky. Silhouetted there, a hawk perches on its lamppost throne, surveying all as if to say, I’m looking out for you. Let go of worry; I will see that all’s as it should be. And with a sweep of his unfolded wings, plunges off the lamp into the broader light of day.
There are moments when one simple thing–the appearance of its shadow under a boat in a clear lake, kids on the playground chanting a silly song, the smell of potatoes roasting in the oven as you walk in the door at the end of the day–stops you in your tracks with a pang of intense gratitude. You’re filled with wonder that something you may have seen or heard or felt a thousand times before can suddenly arrest you and fill you with such an unmitigated thrill. Your internal sky clears, and you remember how it felt to believe without question in today, in tomorrow.
One of the situations that is most able to evoke such potent magic for me is that sweet transitional time when dusk is just about to fall. I’ll be going along the road on the way home, and the peculiar slant of the light makes every color twice as brilliant and saturated as it ought to be, and the clarity of the view seems to intensify so that I feel certain if I looked I could see individual grass-leaves at a hundred yards, maybe even the gossamer lacewing perched on a single blade. I open the window of the car and think that the robin warbling its evensong could be two miles distant and I would hear it just as sharply in its unimpeded clarity, maybe even a hundred miles. Have I fallen into a miracle myself? Become some sort of supernal being?
No, but at this hour and in this light, the new, dense tapestry of wild spring greens lining the side of the road becomes a moment closer to the perfection of heaven’s glow and I feel as though I myself might just take wing. As the evening starts to fall, this glow is rich with grace and filled with dreams of coming good and present hope. And along with every little else, I know that this beautiful glorious nothing of a thing will happen another time, and not when it will come or what it means, only that life is loaded up with marvelous moments of sweet and poignant joy.
That most fa-BLUE-lous of women, Ms. Cyndi Bookchick, just posted about her eternal color love, blue, and while I’m mostly noted as a whopping fool for unlimited color of every kind, I am, among those multitudes, deeply fond of all shades, tints, and hues of the blues. So with that friendly little bump from Cyndi’s blue-sky moment, I am moved to share some pretty blues with alla youse.
Burning in Midwinter
Turquoise of the hottest hue
(A word not often linked with blue)
Bears in its heart the sun’s true fire
From its desert home, where it may transpire
Even in this day of detachment, cool
And belief in only the Facts of school,
That mystic magic and alchemy
Still stalk abroad and begin to be
Unearthed in windstorm when the stone
Under the sand is polished, blown
To visibly capturing sun’s wild rays
To give bold turquoise stone such blaze
Another completely open secret: I am one of the world’s chief exponents of that special breed known as Not A Morning Person. Everyone who knows me even a little is well aware that it’s my firm belief that I am thoroughly Anti-ante-meridian. And that if the world should happen to come perilously close to its end before noonish wherever I happen to be, I will not be prepared to put on my cape and tights, grab my magic wand and zip off to the rescue. So sorry, y’all.
Yippee Skippy for me, I married a man who, despite being unable himself to hibernate for the long periods I require on a constant basis, is sympathetic to my pathetic plight and leaves me untormented, bedding yanked up around my ears, in my mummified position of contentedly deep sleep when he arises.
Except for emergencies and Sundays.
On Sundays, one of the six days a week that he works long hours, if I sleep my Required Daily Allowance, I’d either better’ve gone to bed by about 8 pm on Saturday–not often convenient for those married to guys who conduct, and whose many colleagues and students conduct, concerts at, say, 8 pm on Saturdays and such–or if I sleep in Sunday morning the next time I’ll see him is, well, Monday. That’s how it works for a church choirmaster, at least one with a can’t-dash-home-between length of commute and Evensong on the docket.
The remaining Sunday option for me is to get over myself. So I haul my carcass off of the oh-so-magnetic mattress in the pre-dawn dark and crawl around until I can find my way to join him in the car for the trek SSE toward the Big City. And guess what: I found out there’s pretty stuff all over the sky at sunrise.
Sometimes it’s just the coloration of the dawn that’s so painterly. Marked at the horizon with the lace edging of silhouetted trees and hedges and power transformers, it stretches violet and rose and salmon and gold as far as the bleary eye can see. Almost always, there are thousands of birds taking to the skies en route to their own day jobs, the egrets flapping like clean sheets on the laundry line as they head out fishing and the grackles peppering the air as they look for actual clean laundry to besmirch, the pigeons heading for delicious night shift dinner garbage for their breakfast and the hawks remaining puffed up in their patrician dignity on lampposts while watching for the first ambulatory happy-meal to scurry by below. Even the traffic, being sparser and lit up with twinkly head- and taillights, looks far less plebeian and grubby.
I like the scenery next to me, too.
I can look around at all the glories of an awakening sky and be amazed and awed (yes, odd) and impressed and moved by this stuff I’d never see if I stayed abed. But really, I could get all that gushy admiration going by looking at a great sunset, right? Or if it has to be dawn, by ogling some nice Impressionist paintings or a super-duper set of postcards or some dandy cinematographer’s artwork on the big screen, and I’d never have to pry myself out of that come-hither blanket and pillow nest I so admire. Then I look at the scenery next to me again. I really like that scenery.
And it dawns on me. Seeing the sun rise may be all it’s cracked up to be, but so are NASCAR driving and alligator tagging and ice fishing, to those born to love those activities, and who am I to deprive them of their fill? No reason for me to compete for what I do not desire. I’m happy to report that I do, it turns out, appreciate a beautiful sunrise, but I have no particular need to reaffirm my appreciation except when it’s built into my limited opportunities to spend time with the man who, kinder chronographical conditions permitting, doesn’t harass me when I’m sleeping, even if the sun is getting a bit distant over the yardarm. Now, he is a sight for sorely sleepless eyes.
Art-Colored Glasses 