For the past two weeks or so I have noticed some magic afoot in the mornings. There is the briefest of moments, just after the sky has brightened enough to hide the stars but before the sun itself is visible, when even the most mundane things are bathed in a glowing orange light. A few minutes later and poof, it is gone. Has this been happening every morning and I just never noticed it? Possible, and yet I have been out and about at this phase of sunrise pretty regularly for months and I had never, until recently, noticed this phenomena. Questions began flooding my brain. What is going on? Is this a fleeting thing, just happening now because of a seasonal change in the height and angle of the sun? If so, how long will it last? Will it happen again in the early summer or does it only happen in early winter? Or, have I just not been "seeing" at the right time? And even more puzzling, how exactly is this happening? The sun is not yet up over the ridge when this happens, in fact as you can see by the photos below, once the sun is up and shining on the leaves the glow is entirely gone.
pre-glow glow post-glow
This whole experience tossed me into thinking about what it is that I see and don't see. What do I miss on a daily basis and what are the limits of my ability to see? Just because we can't or don't see something certainly doesn't mean that it doesn't exist and yet so much of how we define our world is by what we think we see. So today, I offer a new "tilt" to my blog. May you catch a bit of the world's glow today.
sun still slung low on the horizon
a wash of orange blankets the earth
lingering for the briefest of moments
as stars fade into a brightening sky
swirling thoughts of the seen
and unseen chase the light
does the soft coo of the mourning dove
color the world as much as its feathers?
is the cool winter air only present as it
rustles the dry, dangling beech leaves?
is my shadow a shape-shifting chameleon
my knowing limited by what I think I see?
how tangible is the energy of hate and love?
are my thoughts only visible
because they are typed here?