I have a “carpe diem” mug and, truthfully, at six in the morning the words do not make me want to seize the day. They make me want to slap a dead poet. ~Joanne Sherman
Anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not a morning person. I’ve never been a morning person, and at 43, I feel confident in predicting that I will never be a morning person. I am frequently aware of the sun rising, thanks to having colleagues in London who, by the time I manage to get my computer running around 6:30 am, are already thinking about what their evening plans hold. However, most often, I don’t take the time to really notice the sun coming up.
This morning, my daughter had to be at work at 6:45 am. She, like thousands of others who work retail, is in the throes of helping those doing their holiday shopping. Sadly, her truck has died a horrible, terrible death, and we have only one car at the moment. Since I need mine today, I found myself trekking to her store to drop her off at a very inhumane 6:15 this morning.
I first noticed a hint of color just as we left our neighborhood, a faint paleness in the sky to the east, just a tinge of navy blue among the black. Moments later, I saw a hint of palest orange reflecting off the clouds on the horizon. I was driving, though, so I had to focus on the road, dark as it was. But just moments after that, something caught my attention in the corner of my eye – a small break-through of orange, and a shift of color from navy to a dark purple – that told me this sunset would be beautiful.
Despite the fact that I’m not a morning person – if I am going to witness a sunrise, I’d rather do it from the other side of midnight – I am a photographer, an artist at heart, and I have watched more sunrises than anyone with an aversion to 5 am should ever see. I’ve stood on the beach at 5 am, camera on tripod, freezing my buns off, waiting for the first peak of a sunrise. Unlike sunsets, which can be somewhat predictable in their results, a sunrise is always a surprise. It’s really difficult, at 4 am when you wake up to go shoot a sunrise, to really know what it’s going to look like, unless it happens to be pouring rain, at which point, I generally crawl right back into bed and go back to sleep. But without that key indicator, one never really knows what’s coming with the sunrise. I have found the most beautiful, photo-worthy sunrises take place in the fall or winter, with partly cloudy skies and slow breezes. The hard part sometimes, particularly when the moon has already disappeared for the night, is determining how clear or cloudy the sky may be.
This morning, the conditions were perfect. Kerstin asked me if we could stop to get donuts, and I was somewhat distracted, considering in my mind how one would translate the sunrise I could already tell would be spectacular, into a quilt. Once I started home after dropping her off, I was able to watch the sunrise without really taking my eyes off the road. It was beautiful. By this time, a thin strip of orange was visible on the bottom of the clouds, which had taken on a deep periwinkle color. As the moments passed, the orange became wider, and the periwinkle grew darker. Above that, however, was the most brilliant blue that occurs in nature. That color of clear skies dotted with clouds of gold, purple, and orange.
A few more moments passed, and more clouds turned orange, their fluffy brilliance appearing almost painted by an unseen hand in the sky. This is when some clouds take on an almost unnatural look, looking as if they were smudges of color on a canvas – they just never look real to me. I’ve often wondered what causes that, but never remember once I get to a computer to actually try to find an answer. At any rate, my breath caught a little in my throat, and I waited for the scene to unfold.
Suddenly, the sky looked like an inverted ocean, full of purple, orange and gold waves moving gently. An old photographer friend of mine once told me, don’t forget to look behind you when taking sunset photos. There’s a lot going on back there, too. That’s also true of sunrises, although in this case, I couldn’t really see behind me. I could, however, see to either side of where the sun was coming up. Peach, purple, orange and blue cascaded across the sky to either side of the sun, which was just beginning to peak over the horizon as I reached home. I stood in the garage, watching the rest of the show unfold – the clouds became a deep orange color, the purple was pushed further out of my field of view … and then, just as suddenly as it had become a magical sunrise, it was over. The sun was up over the horizon, and the sky looked like an ordinary sky. the orange coloring and the cloud definition was gone, it looked slightly overcast and dull. It looked like the sky normally does when I remember to look out of my office window in the morning. It was over.
But the memory of that sunrise will stay with me throughout the day. It was a great way to start a day that I wasn’t so enthusiastic to meet this morning. Maybe it’s God’s way of reminding me that even the mundane routine things can be special, even spectacular, if we take the time to really appreciate them. Message received, Sir. Message received.
If you want to know what I saw this morning, this is a very rough photo, taken with my cell phone, from my driveway. Even in it’s roughness, maybe you can also appreciate the beauty in the mundane!
