Sunrise

Dandy1022, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The sun just rose over the roof of the house across the street. It hit me in the face, and I smiled back. It shines on the front side of all the things between us two -- the striped hostas at the base of the fence, the floating leaves of the grapevine, the tree trunks, the potted petunias. 

Later today it will be hot and noisy. There'll be bees in the garden and cars in the street, things to take care of, decide, do. Now, it's bird conversations, cool air, tall, silent trees. 

I woke up at 5 this morning. Keeping my mind clear enough to go back to sleep seemed futile. My phone said it was still a few minutes before sunrise. Opportunity! What does sunrise look like on a day so close to the summer solstice? I sometimes see the sun rise in December. But what about now, today?

What to do with the bonus time in the morning? Finish the novel I've been reading — "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead," by Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish writer and Nobel Prize winner — and then shake off its world in the light of day. The book is a murder mystery of sorts, set in Poland on a plateau near the border with the Czech Republic, far from Illinois -- seven hours ahead. The sun there is already at the top of the sky and soon heading back down. 

Light shining recalls last week at my church -- five mornings of Vacation Bible School for children from preschool through age 10. I was not a volunteer at the crafts or snacks or Bible story station. I was there for just the first 15 minutes each day, playing an astronaut (improbably, against type) in the opening skit. This is where friendship with the Children's Ministry Coordinator will take you. My character Mickey Wey had some issues throughout the week. And the solutions, Monday through Friday, were always a variation on "shine Jesus' light" into good news or bad. 

Our relationship with the sun's light is so elemental. Smack, it hit me in the face this morning. (I've heard it rises like that every morning.) It's the same sun that ruled over my childhood summers. Of course it figures into our efforts to grasp and understand reality beyond ourselves, along with the basic rhythms of life. Stones, sundials, carvings from ancient civilizations show the sacred power of the sun and its light. "Shine Jesus' light" is a good metaphor. It works, no matter how old you are. It tells you a lot about how to live as a follower of Jesus.

It's almost 7. My wake-up alarm will go off any minute now. The sun's been up for almost two hours. It's still shining at me through the maple tree on the corner, but the early morning magic has faded. In a half hour or so it will be above the trees and I'll need to tilt the patio umbrella to shield my eyes and my computer screen from the glare. It won't be shining golden light into the nooks and crannies of plants my world view, but it will shine down on a busy Saturday's chores, shopping, recreation. 

The narrator — the unreliable narrator — of "Drive Your Plow, etc." is an astrologer. She looks to the angles and motion of planets crossing one another's influence to find truth and direction about human fate, as well as to discover the date of her own death. Astrology, the casting of horoscopes, has elaborate rules. They're stated with authority in the novel, but the mind glazes over these as you read them -- at least mine did, with no grounding in the subject. The stories created from the rules, however -- well, they are the story, sometimes truthful, sometimes not. 

Much of the novel takes place at night. There are warm, loving human encounters and dark, drunken violent ones. That's part of what drove me out of bed this morning -- I wanted to read the resolution to that unreliable story-telling not while drifting off to sleep, but in the morning light, . 

Shine the light.