sunrising

if the sun rises in the east and no one's around to attend it, does it still shine?

A few separate winters now, I start going outside to watch the sunrise every day. It’s easy! It rises so late.

This Jan or Feb, I started going out into my tiny city backyard, listening to the birds, watching the brightening sky over the fence. No need to be strict, right? No need to go out right at sunrise? I could keep this going! This whole “go out first thing upon waking, whenever waking may occur” thing. Easy!

I thought of

Sarah & Sheri

’s words in So We And Our Children May Live:

I am amazed, on the mornings I can give thanks, to stand and witness that every morning is singular, unique. At dawn, creation is rediscovered, renegotiated. The early morning light reveals the robust and fragile world around me with a new lens—today’s lens.

Ok, so Sarah Augustine goes out and gives thanks in the morning? I can do that! She didn’t say right at sunrise.

Then I listened to one of her podcast episodes, and a guest talked about going out at sunrise. Every day. For almost 20 years!

One of the most important, life-changing spiritual disciplines that I’ve incorporated into my life: to do what my people have done for hundreds, thousands of years: to get up every morning and greet the morning sunrise with my prayers. I’ve been watching the sunrise on a regular basis for the past 20 years of my life, and it has been a life-changing experience for me.

When you rise up every morning—day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, eventually decade after decade—it does something deep in your spirituality that I was not expecting.

I got to understand and know Creator. Through much the same process as my people have been knowing Creator for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

And in that process, one of the things I learned, was how to feel comfortable being out of control. When you watch the sunrise, when you watch the birds migrate, when you see the flowers bloom and die, when you see the seasons change, the rains the winds everything happening all around, what you recognize as you do it day after day, week after week, year after year, you’re like…

The sunrise happens. You can’t control it. You can’t make it come quicker or make it come later, you can’t speed it up or slow it down. It happens.

The question is: are you gonna be there to be a part of it?

Oof, dang, that’s almost convincing! Maybe I did wanna be a part of it!

But I still kind of wanted an out. When Sarah Augustine visited, I asked her if she goes out at sunrise. Every day? Like, all year?

Yes, she said. Maybe someday I won’t, she said, as my Multiple Sclerosis progresses. Maybe someday I’ll just go out after I happen to wake up.

Well shit. That’s a good excuse. It’s gonna take a chronic degenerative disease to stop her from getting out? And I’m here whining about what exactly?

Earth, my body

At her Saturday morning talk, Sarah talked about her morning practice. Sitting on the earth. Touching it. Speaking these words.

Earth, my body.

In her land acknowledgement, she made it clear not just that we were on land that belongs to a displaced people, but is made of those people. In a literal way. The soil itself, in part: made of ancestors’ decomposed bodies.

Our bodies feed the soil and the soil feeds our bodies. The earth is our extended body.

Sophie Strand

says this well in The Body Is A Doorway:

We pretend that the Earth we burn for fuel, gash for minerals, and mutilate for capital gain is not connected to us. We live above it. We pretend this Earth is not our own body, extended.

We are not floating above this Earth. We are intimately, materially, metabolically linked with every plant, animal, and ecology that is grappling with unimaginable pain and disruption. We have been numb for so long we no longer understand that the body we are harming is an extension of our own. When we clear-cut a forest or drive another population of birds to extinction, we do not somatically register that we are twisting a knife in our own side.

“Take. Eat. This is my body.” Jesus instructs in the Gospel of John, offering the disciples bread. There is a deep biological mysticism in that offering. What we hunger for, we become. By eating bread, we transform ourselves not into sons and daughters of God, but into looped, interpenetrative companions of barley and yeast and salt and sunshine.

“Interpenetrative.” The barley and yeast and salt penetrate our shells; become part of us. We penetrate the soil, till it, plant it, and eventually, become part of it again.

---

I had learned the rest of the “Earth, my body” refrain from Kanyon CoyoteWoman at a camp last summer:

Earth, my body.
Air, my breath.
Water, my blood.
Fire, my spirit.

I decided to show up for the sunrise. It was still midwinter; it was still easy. I would follow the sun as it journeyed earlier. It would make the beginning of Daylight Savings Time feel like nothing! I would see how it worked on me; how it felt if I stayed strict about it for long enough to have an effect.

I stopped my attempts at learning vipassana meditation (who has time for more than one daily spiritual practice 😂) and found a sitting spot half a block from my house in the cemetery/arboretum.

Minute-for-minute, I have found sunrise-watching to be a much more potent discipline than meditation. Given the same amount of time “invested”, watching the sunrise yields greater inner peace and calm-within-the-day’s-chaos than meditation. For me. (If that’s not a sales pitch tailored to our fucked up, workaholic, productivity-obsessed culture, I don’t know what is! “Sunrise watching: the most efficient spiritual discipline.” Don’t you want your spiritual practice to be… efficient?? Surely there’s no better way to measure spirituality! 😂)

I started this mid-Feb. In early March, I decided to start writing down a sentence or two of gratitude or just observation every day. These ended up reminding me of

Chris La Tray

’s one-sentence journals, and I thought they might be fun for you to read here. (My sunrise watching continues, but I’ve already stopped the journaling practice, so don’t expect another one of these posts with my April reflections! But if one or two of you comment that you really want more such, maybe I’ll start again.)

Without further ado,

my daily-ish sunrise journals

3 March: Thank you long arms of sun; long mountains of cloud; for wrapping us, for keeping us warm in your luminous embrace; for dazzling our eyes skyward toward the glittering crown you place on our unworthy heads.

4 March: arrived after devices told me sun had already risen, bleary eyes cast unseeing toward sky, until sky looks back at me, eyeball sun peering through cloud’s own squinting eyelid. I missed nothing. Thank you for seeing me.

5 March: a friend’s hospitality and a slowly brightening gray reflected in East River ripples and tower glass, punctuated by pops of pigeons flapping furiously above buildings, startled from perches by runners below.

6 March: a smell of wet earth that used to signal spring and a seat-finding meander to peep horizon’s thin orange worm. With the sun so far above, why are the clouds still gray? Surely it hits these clouds, too? They don’t look THAT thick. Maybe their tops are brilliant. But keep your eye to the textured sky—geese, 17 in a line, flying north.

7 March: new sitting spot, under old Sycamore—or is it a London Plane Tree?—almost too perfectly positioned, tumbling hemisphere careening into daylight, sun blasting over rooftops into cloudless sky, stabbing deep into pupils. Glory.

8 March: crocuses burst into purple.

thanks to the person at my coworking space who attempted to make an HDR composite from my two unaligned photos; cloud & branch movements rendered the sky psychedelic but honestly it feels more accurate that way

9 March: a rise in volume from trees above as peeking rays work their way down the branches. When that good sun hits you, you can’t help but sing. Probably you sing a familiar song of praise—a chanted “om,” “Amazing Grace”—or maybe the new day draws out a new song.

And now begin the long months when sun rises too far north to shine low and orange through kitchen window.

look at those crisp shadows; that barely-even-yellow-let-alone-orange light from a sun already 5º above horizon

10 March: squirrel tip-tiptoed around a tombstone, waffled erratic nose at me, body seizing with nervousness, then scampered off. How long before I am Ace Ventura?

11 March: the birds liked this sycamore, before I started sitting under it. Today they cautiously returned. Carolina chickadee sang their sweet song, two branches above. A playful robin couple hopped from behind tombstones, cast me side eye, chattered.

12 March: the sky a perfect patchwork of blue and pink cotton candy, sun’s orange gradient draped with thin veil of cloud, atmospheric conditions just right for every passing jet to leave an everlasting contrail, until the sky is crisscrossed with brilliant worms. What did the sky look like on these mornings before engine particulates seeded condensation? What will it look like once they no longer do?

13 March: thank you patient birds for teaching me your songs. Thank you robin who came to have a conversation with me. On a morning when the sky barely shifted from gray.

14 March: dark gray to light gray. Hip cramp on run prevented timely return to sitting spot. Same clouds here, though. Brightening everywhere.

15 March: dark gray to light gray. Enthusiastic children accompanied; wanted to know where the sun was. “So far above the clouds.”

16 March: dark gray to light gray. Nine geese burst over rooftop behind me, flying east, flying low.

17 March: dark gray to light gray. Wet earth, dry sky. Smell of verdant mud. Bird chorus. Robin friends have not yet come back to visit. I hear them before I see them. I see them dare each other to the top of the ginkgo tree.

18 March: pale grass, color returning, below brightening pink and blue, and it finally dawns on my chuckling mouth: this is why we celebrate this season with pastels.

19 March: a ladder of contrails heading straight west in southern sky is the first to fade from pink to white. Moon watches over right shoulder. Robin couple seems annoyed. Am I in their spot? Good to see you, friends!

20 March: blazing sun through airplane windows. Too soon.

21 March: beautiful canals, beautiful canyons of brick. Sun fades up; landscape too flat to watch it rise. I install the European expansion pack and shazam a new bird: the great tit.

22 March - 28 March: unobserved / unobservant

29 March: orange fireball over New York from airport hotel window. Jet-lagged children rejoice.

30 March: orange pink sun blob peeks out cloud eyelet; come look! I tell playing children. The sun! shouts six year old. It's rising! Here, we need to rise too, she says. She guides us to lay in the grass, rise to a squat, hold flat hands near shoulders, slowly rise. Maybe 30 seconds later, the ritual concludes; play continues.

31 March: grass yoga, twenty minutes. Inverted faces of elated children, running to tell me of their games. After yoga, I order breakfast at their patisserie.