Another Dawn

Dawn is still wonderful -- after nearly 30 years of not being able to see dawn, the pleasure of living where I can look out any and all my windows and see the dawn continues to make me pick up my camera and take yet one more photo. I wake up early, I can always see the dawn but it will always be different. This particular photo reminds me of the frequent phrase in at least one translation of the Odyssey, "rosy fingered dawn."

I just read on someone else's blog a quote from the Islamic poet, Rumi. The breeze of the dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep." I take his advice. I am not mystical enough to think in terms of secrets being told by the dawn. I think the "secret" is just that when one is aware of something repeatedly, when one pays attention to the simplest facts of nature [that no two dawns are alike] one is grounded in the real world, which is much larger than ourselves.

A New Dawn Every Day

Before I moved here I never saw a dawn unless I as away from the city, which was very rare. When I moved to Cape Cod I was delighted to be able to choose an apartment that faced east. This time of year I am usually up at least a quarter of an hour before dawn, so I can make breakfast and generally have it eaten before the sky colors with the first of the dawn. Most often I have turned on the computer and am looking at news [I have no TV -- thus I have no audible commercials] and I'm sitting where the dawn is entirely visible if I turn my head just a little to the left. Often I stop and watch the glob of gold creep up through the bare branches of the trees and sometimes it is so bright I have to pull the middle of three shades on the wide window because it hits me blindingly.


Every now and then it is so splendid I open the nearby slider to the patio and step out in the cold to take a photo. These are two. Of course no two are alike which reminds me that really no two days are alike either. Some days, of course, it's gray and the clouds are thick and I only see lightness arrive. I don't suppose I'd want it to be otherwise. No philosophizing and no poetry -- the pictures are poetry enough.