Today, there is no memory. That doesn’t sound right – sorry – there are always memories. Today there is no strength to face them. I can’t do it, lay bare my wounds. Perhaps courage is failing me.
Today, I’ll go see the sun, dance on the frozen river, lay down in the middle of it. I’ll take pictures of the sky and watch as the birds fly from shore to shore.
It has been a hard two weeks, wonderful in many ways, but also so very heavy. A lot of tears. I know that by writing I am healing. I can tell when I’ve written down a memory it’s as though I’ve given it a new home. One by one, they are placed somewhere safe. It is freeing to know that I’m no longer responsible for being their keeper.
But to write the story I have to have to relive it. It’s not as simple as remembering. I have to walk back into those moments. They’re not pictures I passively look at. When I write about my mother, I can hear her voice, the noises of the house; I smell the food in the kitchen, and see the position of the sun outside the window. Everything is moving around me.
I am an observer, a knowing observer, who watches helplessly as things unfold. I see little me running happily from the playground……. Can’t do it. Nope, can’t do this today.
Sorry, walked away from the laptop.
I’m going to tell you about the fourteen sunrises I’ve seen this year so far. Here goes.
The sight…
No two sunrises have been the same. Even the grey mornings have a beautiful complexity to them. The clouds wrestled for space, pushing each other, trying to reach higher. They’re never uniform in colour; the camera on my phone doesn’t catch the shades very well, but my eyes do. All the subtle changes, the textures, the granular way heavier pockets of moisture appear like bubbles in an otherwise light mist.
The sound…
The rising sun isn’t silent, not in my experience. I can’t say for certain, but I imagine every heart hears a different sound, a symphony of sounds; a guitar, a drum, a fiddle, a sitar. Whatever the music of your soul; that is the sound of sunrise. It is soft at first, but as you watch the first rays of light break the horizon, the crescendo grows into a magnificent roar.
The smell…
The earth is perhaps at her coldest after the long night, she too has been asleep. But as the sky brightens and the air warms, you can smell her wakening breaths. She exhales, stretches out after a long slumber; hers is the scent of snow, trees, the wind, the waving prairie wheat grass.
The touch…
If you ever need to feeling that anything and everything is possible, meet the rising sun. Touch the earth as she touches it. Even on the coldest days, there is warmth, a motherly tenderness. The sun is after all, the mother of all living things.
Sunrise isn’t dramatic, there is no big ball of fire; sunrise is soft, the earth blooming.
