Dawn Light

Looking at the photos gives you an idea of what the sunlight is going to be doing for the next half hour -- only if you have seen it and paid attention.

Think of what you might see if you look to the right or left, perpendicular to the sun's rays. You see something that will not occur again just that way for the rest of the day: the eastern edge of everything is clad in bright gold, slapped on as the thickest of guache, stabbed onto edges of barns, tree trunks, blades of grass, dew drops . . . .

It is as if you were invited there to be alone, to have everything etched onto your retinas forever -- that brief portrait of reality eternal.

I remember thinking that possibly three hundred years ago, a voyageur stood stretching beside his canoe, under which he had slept; and before he rolled up his bedding and started breakfast, he looked at the same slopes, same water, same boulders, perhaps that I see now, clad in the same intensity of light. Or ten thousand years ago . . . .

Now a flash of light on the day 

Sun rising over the islands downstream

The sun is beginning to show downstream. 

A Starting Point

Writing at about dawn has always been a soothing experience for me: I feel as if, for a few moments, I have the world to myself.

I could ramble on about how the world is an unstained parchment at that time of day, but what the hey?

The landscape for this thought stream is on the island, just about dawn, on a day that is going to be warm and mainly clear, with light breezes and softly lapping water. (I say this, even though, as I write it, the temperature outside the quonset hut is well below the freezing point of alcohol, and the wind is howling like an unforgiven ghost.) The birds awakened and started their complicated morning ritual of scoping out the prospects for the day just as the first few flakes of sunlight started pinging against the stars. If I awaken just then, I wonder why birds are making such a clatter in the middle of the night. But a stretch and a ramble over the creaking wooden floors as I don my bathrobe allows me to peer out the window: dawn is on its way. Through the trees to the east of the cottage, I can see the first pink harbingers gathering on thin horizontal steaks of cloud.

Moments later, in shorts and wool sweater, I head out for the east end of the island, watching the colours bloom over islands down the river. My bare feet leave a dark rhythmic trail in the cool misted grass.