sun gift at year's end

sunrise:  7:12          blog time remaining: 2 sunrises (!)

The rising of the sun is like a new birth, every day. That is the reason to witness it.  

A rebirth. 

Seeing the light.  

A new day.   

Starting over.   

The world is carrying on as it should.   

All those great reminders in one quiet event.

I haven't seen a sunrise like today's for a long time.  I almost decided they were not a winter phenomenon, but I was happily mistaken.  I hope you will indulge my overexuberance in photography today.  I am feeling somewhat wistful about saying good-bye to the dawn - at least, dawn on a daily basis.  So I will not skimp on its glories.

As a Christmas gift to my parents I created a sunrise photo calendar of Big Wolf, the Adirondack lake where I spent a couple of weeks last summer.  Then I pulled out snippets of writing from my sunrise blog posts and included them as captions.  It came out pretty nicely.

One line I found said this:  "Dawn is a good time to shed preoccupations and worry."  Today this proved particularly true.

It is pointless, I know, but I occasionally fall prone to worries about things over which I have no control.  As I lay in bed last night, I could not get rid of the image of my son flying over the Pacific Ocean.  16 hours in the air, so he's still up there somewhere, on his way from San Francisco to Hong Kong.  I tried the white light trick that I used last summer, when he was on his way to Argentina (what a year of travel he has had!).  It only helped a little bit.

When I awoke to my alarm and saw the beginnings of this rosy dawn, I hurried my stretches, rushed outside, and sprinted (as best anyone can sprint in snowshoes) out to the back yard.  For one lovely half hour, I didn't worry about my darling S thousands of feet in the air over a vast ocean.

Today's dawn was an extraordinary gift.  It almost felt like a parting gesture of encouragement.

*** update note:  just received an email - S is safely landed in Hong Kong!  What a great day.