Sue Vincent's Blog: Echoes of Life - Posts Tagged "dawn"
Morning Mists
My breath hung on the air, echoing the shifting mists over the village as I stood on the hill this morning watching the pale sun rising in the east. The dog ran through the undergrowth chasing elusive scents, catching little crystals of frost in her fur.
Though not far from the village and the road, the world was silent apart from the muffled birdsong, wrapped in a magical blanket of amorphous white, cocooning the landscape in mystery. Yet there was an unmistakable air of awakening as the sun rose, tinting the mists with rose-gold. A burgeoning awareness, a glimpse of distant headlights as the world woke to action, a whisper of activity carried on the air. Tiny lights defined by distant windows flickered like terrestrial stars through the shrouding wraiths as households awoke and began their day beneath the pall of mist.
I watched the sun as it came up, a luminous eye gazing over a numinous world.
For a moment as the dawn bathed the surface of the mist below me, the face of the world changed. Nothing below the liquid gold existed to my sight, only the clear blue of the morning sky and the golden illusory sea of mist upon which I felt I could have walked to the horizon and into the sun itself. It was an echo of eternity in a single heartbeat. The humdrum life of necessity and duty was engulfed in glory. It was still there, the foundation upon which this beauty lay, supporting it from below, reaching through it as tree top or spire, yet hidden as my usual perception of reality shifted and was lifted clear and untrammelled to soar with the kite on gilded wings.
Not for the first time it came to me how close this was to man’s quest for the Light. We spend much of our lives seeking our way blindly, following what little light we can find, yet above us, if we have the courage and commitment to make the climb, the pure, clear Light awaits us always, whether we perceive it or not through the shrouding mists of normality.
The sons of dawn will greet the liquid Light,
Lustral gold on heavens canvas glowing.
Painted magic banishing the night
Gilds the dream of every Seeker’s knowing.
Wings of morning flutter on the breeze,
Crystal raindrops scatter diamond bright,
Feathered choirs haunting in the trees
Bear the Seeker’s soul in joyful flight.
Though not far from the village and the road, the world was silent apart from the muffled birdsong, wrapped in a magical blanket of amorphous white, cocooning the landscape in mystery. Yet there was an unmistakable air of awakening as the sun rose, tinting the mists with rose-gold. A burgeoning awareness, a glimpse of distant headlights as the world woke to action, a whisper of activity carried on the air. Tiny lights defined by distant windows flickered like terrestrial stars through the shrouding wraiths as households awoke and began their day beneath the pall of mist.
I watched the sun as it came up, a luminous eye gazing over a numinous world.
For a moment as the dawn bathed the surface of the mist below me, the face of the world changed. Nothing below the liquid gold existed to my sight, only the clear blue of the morning sky and the golden illusory sea of mist upon which I felt I could have walked to the horizon and into the sun itself. It was an echo of eternity in a single heartbeat. The humdrum life of necessity and duty was engulfed in glory. It was still there, the foundation upon which this beauty lay, supporting it from below, reaching through it as tree top or spire, yet hidden as my usual perception of reality shifted and was lifted clear and untrammelled to soar with the kite on gilded wings.
Not for the first time it came to me how close this was to man’s quest for the Light. We spend much of our lives seeking our way blindly, following what little light we can find, yet above us, if we have the courage and commitment to make the climb, the pure, clear Light awaits us always, whether we perceive it or not through the shrouding mists of normality.
The sons of dawn will greet the liquid Light,
Lustral gold on heavens canvas glowing.
Painted magic banishing the night
Gilds the dream of every Seeker’s knowing.
Wings of morning flutter on the breeze,
Crystal raindrops scatter diamond bright,
Feathered choirs haunting in the trees
Bear the Seeker’s soul in joyful flight.
Morning Glory
It is 4am and I haven’t slept a wink. I’m not entirely happy about that. It is not as if I haven’t tried. My mind whirrs gently, emotions heightened by a frustrated fatigue. Ani is draped across the sofa snoring softly. For all I would, at this point, much rather be asleep, I love this time of day.
The sun has lit the touchpaper of the horizon and the east is edged in palest gold, the fire of dawn spreading silently over a sleeping land. The first bird just started to sing, Another has joined and the morning chorus has begun. There is a rainwashed freshness in the air and the colour, still absent from the ground, now gilds the sky, shifting the focus upwards.
It is as if the hand of God has opened a window allowing us a brief glimpse of glory, lifting the eyes away from the earth towards a realm higher and clearer than the one in which we move. That small shift in focus alters perception completely and the world becomes a wider place filled with a magical possibility as I watch the sun crest the horizon and see its pale eye with my own.
It seems as if the light steals in over the landscape, illuminating each leaf and branch, so softly it cannot be measured, yet bringing them to a life of living colour moment by moment. As it does so, the focus shifts again, back to earth and the glory of the morning sky is forgotten as attention is drawn to the detail of living, familiar green.
Yet it is still there. The sky is still full of light, the sun still rides the heavens all through the day, so bright it cannot be perceived directly but only by looking at the world it holds in light.
Of course, I see the analogy in this. A daily, unregarded reminder of the way in which our attention is glued to the details of everyday life, while the essence of the soul need only shift the focus to see whence it comes and in what it has its being.
Most mornings I miss the summer dawn, dreaming of other realms while my own awakens unseen around me as I sleep. Missing too this moment of the daily reminder of the beauty of light as it performs its revelation of reality while slumber holds my eyes closed and my mind absent.
It is a brief miracle every day. In the few minutes it has taken to write this the sun has risen, the world is flooded with light and had I just woken I would look at the earth and not the sky, mesmerised by the colours of leaf and flower. To share this moment with the dawn is a gift.
The sun has lit the touchpaper of the horizon and the east is edged in palest gold, the fire of dawn spreading silently over a sleeping land. The first bird just started to sing, Another has joined and the morning chorus has begun. There is a rainwashed freshness in the air and the colour, still absent from the ground, now gilds the sky, shifting the focus upwards.
It is as if the hand of God has opened a window allowing us a brief glimpse of glory, lifting the eyes away from the earth towards a realm higher and clearer than the one in which we move. That small shift in focus alters perception completely and the world becomes a wider place filled with a magical possibility as I watch the sun crest the horizon and see its pale eye with my own.
It seems as if the light steals in over the landscape, illuminating each leaf and branch, so softly it cannot be measured, yet bringing them to a life of living colour moment by moment. As it does so, the focus shifts again, back to earth and the glory of the morning sky is forgotten as attention is drawn to the detail of living, familiar green.
Yet it is still there. The sky is still full of light, the sun still rides the heavens all through the day, so bright it cannot be perceived directly but only by looking at the world it holds in light.
Of course, I see the analogy in this. A daily, unregarded reminder of the way in which our attention is glued to the details of everyday life, while the essence of the soul need only shift the focus to see whence it comes and in what it has its being.
Most mornings I miss the summer dawn, dreaming of other realms while my own awakens unseen around me as I sleep. Missing too this moment of the daily reminder of the beauty of light as it performs its revelation of reality while slumber holds my eyes closed and my mind absent.
It is a brief miracle every day. In the few minutes it has taken to write this the sun has risen, the world is flooded with light and had I just woken I would look at the earth and not the sky, mesmerised by the colours of leaf and flower. To share this moment with the dawn is a gift.
Sleepy bees and a joyous goat
The weekend started early… Wednesday afternoon to be precise. I had headed northwards, allowing extra time for the inevitable motorway delays that never happened, so I found myself within 15 minutes of my city destination with an hour or two to spare.
And there was a crossroads….
I knew what lay behind me and what lay ahead…. Left looked like a good option…I couldn’t see very much but that was because the road ran uphill. In that region, I need no further encouragement. Pulling over into a field gate, hoping to get a shot of a little bridge, I found instead a sleepy bee nestled in a terrestrial sun, and a sky that took my breath away.
And still the road headed upwards…and I inevitably followed. I was surprised to find a car-park in the middle of nowhere, it seemed. There had to be a reason for it, so I swung the car in, grabbed the camera and set out to explore. Up a few steps, along a wooded path by a field… then the way opened onto glory and sunlight on stone and heather.
Camera flare? Did I care? Laughing into the wind, a “joyous little goat, leaping on the crags”, as one dear friend put it… She’s right too. About the joyousness… the Pennines get me every time.
I don’t know what it is, whether it is the geology, limestone and millstone grit, the shape of the valleys and crags, the great boulder-strewn hillsides… Maybe it is the colours of the vegetation or the way the clouds come down to play… or something in the air…the quality of the light…
Maybe we are simply attuned to the landscape of home…
It lifts my heart and makes my soul sing, no matter how hard things are, no matter how much I hurt, no matter, even, how happy I am… all other emotion is brushed aside by that surging joy when I stand beneath that sky on those hills.
Over the weekend we were to be blessed with glorious weather and I was to play amongst the stones and the heather, discovering otherworldly landscapes… but I didn’t know that then… all I knew was that moment and that joy.
When the time comes to leave again, as it did early this morning, and I turn southwards for home there is a physical pang of separation as I leave the hills behind. This morning was no exception and the wrench brings tears, every time.
Yet I was treated to the beauty of a dawn over the magical landscape of Albion, before plunging below the mists into a grey and ghostly world. As I drove through the lower lands and cars joined mine on the roads it struck me that they, waking from sleep and setting out on their day’s journey, had not yet seen the sun. They did not know how beautiful it was above the clouds they saw as fog. But I had seen... I had been gifted a privileged glimpse of its delicate beauty.
The sun was already there, is always there, but sometimes, as now, invisible, hidden. Within that colourless landscape another dawn waited, distant and luminous. Just waiting for the right moment, the right conditions… the right landscape in which to reveal itself. I marvelled at the way that nature mirrors our own lives, all unnoticed most of the time, yet of course it would… we are not separate from nature but part of it… part of the fauna of this beautiful planet and the world around us has so much to teach us if we but look.
Like the bees, chilled by the cooler autumnal air and asleep, seemingly unaware, in the middle of beautiful flowers, we sink into slumber, forgetting the sun’s light simply because it is unseen. In the same way we seem to forget the simple, unfettered joys when the cold mists of worry and the pressures of the mundane world cloud our vision. Joy, too, is always there… a possibility, unseen perhaps… but not unknowable. Sometimes we just have to find the right road….
And there was a crossroads….
I knew what lay behind me and what lay ahead…. Left looked like a good option…I couldn’t see very much but that was because the road ran uphill. In that region, I need no further encouragement. Pulling over into a field gate, hoping to get a shot of a little bridge, I found instead a sleepy bee nestled in a terrestrial sun, and a sky that took my breath away.
And still the road headed upwards…and I inevitably followed. I was surprised to find a car-park in the middle of nowhere, it seemed. There had to be a reason for it, so I swung the car in, grabbed the camera and set out to explore. Up a few steps, along a wooded path by a field… then the way opened onto glory and sunlight on stone and heather.
Camera flare? Did I care? Laughing into the wind, a “joyous little goat, leaping on the crags”, as one dear friend put it… She’s right too. About the joyousness… the Pennines get me every time.
I don’t know what it is, whether it is the geology, limestone and millstone grit, the shape of the valleys and crags, the great boulder-strewn hillsides… Maybe it is the colours of the vegetation or the way the clouds come down to play… or something in the air…the quality of the light…
Maybe we are simply attuned to the landscape of home…
It lifts my heart and makes my soul sing, no matter how hard things are, no matter how much I hurt, no matter, even, how happy I am… all other emotion is brushed aside by that surging joy when I stand beneath that sky on those hills.
Over the weekend we were to be blessed with glorious weather and I was to play amongst the stones and the heather, discovering otherworldly landscapes… but I didn’t know that then… all I knew was that moment and that joy.
When the time comes to leave again, as it did early this morning, and I turn southwards for home there is a physical pang of separation as I leave the hills behind. This morning was no exception and the wrench brings tears, every time.
Yet I was treated to the beauty of a dawn over the magical landscape of Albion, before plunging below the mists into a grey and ghostly world. As I drove through the lower lands and cars joined mine on the roads it struck me that they, waking from sleep and setting out on their day’s journey, had not yet seen the sun. They did not know how beautiful it was above the clouds they saw as fog. But I had seen... I had been gifted a privileged glimpse of its delicate beauty.
The sun was already there, is always there, but sometimes, as now, invisible, hidden. Within that colourless landscape another dawn waited, distant and luminous. Just waiting for the right moment, the right conditions… the right landscape in which to reveal itself. I marvelled at the way that nature mirrors our own lives, all unnoticed most of the time, yet of course it would… we are not separate from nature but part of it… part of the fauna of this beautiful planet and the world around us has so much to teach us if we but look.
Like the bees, chilled by the cooler autumnal air and asleep, seemingly unaware, in the middle of beautiful flowers, we sink into slumber, forgetting the sun’s light simply because it is unseen. In the same way we seem to forget the simple, unfettered joys when the cold mists of worry and the pressures of the mundane world cloud our vision. Joy, too, is always there… a possibility, unseen perhaps… but not unknowable. Sometimes we just have to find the right road….
