Stormy skies make the best sunrises

All of the photos on this page were take from the same hill on my land in Pine County, Minnesota, looking east.  And all of them were taken on cloudy mornings.

"Minnesota Snowscape"

On a clear dawn, there isn't much of a show.  The sky gradually gets lighter, there's a strip of orange on the horizon, the sun comes up, and that's it.  One clear day looks pretty much like another.  I don't photograph many of those.

But on a cloudy morning, there is potential for some really great shots.  No two cloud formations are ever the same, and the scene lasts much longer as the sun rises behind the clouds.  When I see a cloudy dawn, I grab my camera and head for my favorite spot.

"Dragon in the Sky"

And there's always that one special moment when it all peaks.  Capturing that moment can be a challenge, because you don't really know when it is coming.  So I shoot a series of shots and then choose the best.  It doesn't always pan out, but when it does, the results are spectacular. (As for the duds, well, as my father told me many years ago, even professional photographers take bad pictures -- they just don't show them to anybody.  For every great pic on my blog, there were a whole lot of deletes.)

"Flaming Sunrise"

When I was a child living in the city, we used to sing a song about "rain, rain go away -- come again another day, little Johnny wants to play." From an urban perspective, rain was a nuisance that kept me from going outside and having fun.  But now that I'm older and we are in the middle of a major drought, I realize that my childish wish for "rain, rain go away" would be a curse.  Without rain in summer and snow storms in winter, a lot of plants and animals suffer.  Including us humans.

"Red in the Morning"

And now comes the homily.  Life, like a sunrise, varies from day to day.  We say we'd like to have perpetually clear skies, but in reality that would be rather boring.  It's the clouds in our lives that add some interest, even if they do sometimes rain on our parades.  The storms provide the challenges.  As I look back over my life, the "sunny days" are pretty much one big blur.  The ones that stand out are those that -- for good or bad -- brought some excitement into my life.  And even those dark days had important lessons for me to learn.

This is not to say I'm always excited to have disruptions in my life.  After all, some storms can be really destructive.  But, as the old saying goes, there's a silver lining in every cloud.  Or, in the case of sunrises, there's always the potential for a really great peak experience.  Maybe this is why just about every religion has the symbolism of moving from the darkness into the light.  And every storm contains a potential rainbow.

"After the Storm"

You can't fast forward a sunset ~ and other TIME-ly thoughts

A while back I was teaching a circle dance to some children and told them to go clockwise.  They looked at me blankly and had no idea what I was talking about.  Their generation is used to digital clocks -- which do not go in circles at all -- and that got me to thinking about how we experience time.   "Clockwise" comes from the way that the shadow moves on a sundial.   Later, this was carried over onto the faces of mechanical clocks.  In both cases, time is seen as a continuous, cyclical flow.  

An hourglass, on the other hand, is not cyclical. It has a beginning and an end. But it still shows a flow of time, as the grains of sand slowly run down. A digital clock, however, shows time as broken up into a bunch of individual numbered moments that are often disconnected from each other.  All of this may seem like a bunch of nitpicking, but I wonder how it affects the way we see the natural world.   Nature goes in cycles. Days, months, years-- all are based on the somewhat circular patterns of rotations and orbits. Even the elliptical orbits of comets go in cycles.  And they all move at their own pace. But are we losing that sense of the "flow" of time?

So last week I was watching a program on PBS about how families are spending less and less time outdoors, and how this, combined with the high speed of modern technology, is indeed distorting our inner sense of time.  "You can't fast forward a sunset," one of the panelists said, and that statement has stuck with me. In a world where you can speed up, slow down, or freeze-frame a movie, or watch it over and over anytime you want to, the slow steady pace of nature  often seems boring. So kids prefer to stay indoors and play speedy video games instead.

Yet it is precisely that slowness that allows us to relax and tune in to God's creation.    Being with nature is a form of meditation. Our bodies evolved in nature, the Garden of Eden was in nature -- however you define it, we need the natural pace of with nature.  But nowadays, even meditation is speeded up -- or at least people try to shortcut it. They go to a weekend seminar to get "enlightened" and are disappointed it it doesn't "work" right away.   But true enlightenment is a lifelong process that takes hours and hours of quiet contemplation.  You can't get there by plunking down your money for a workshop and no, there isn't an app for it, either.

The only way you can freeze-frame a sunset - or any event in nature - is to take a picture of it. Even then, you only have a small part of the real experience.  In photographing sunrises (which I seem to do more than sunsets lately), I have found that there is always a perfect moment where everything in the picture is just right.  The minutes before and after that are beautiful, too, but that peak moment is the best picture in the series.  However, in order to capture that moment, I have to patiently sit there for about 45 minutes or more, because the sunrise is going to unfold at its own pace, and there's not a darned thing I can do about it. It's happening on God's time, not mine.

Watching a sunrise is a "letting go" experience that requires us to fit into nature's pace, not the other way around. Only when you are willing to just sit there quietly and absorb the experience are you able to notice the subtle changes from second to second and minute to minute. There's that magical moment about an hour before dawn,  when the first bird begins to sing, when the rooster begins to crow and the wild geese begin to honk. In Jewish law, the earliest time you can say the Shema prayer is when you can distinguish a blue thread from a white one.  Try it at dawn sometime.

  

Sunrise on the Gershom farm
Pine County, Minnesota, Sept. 21, 2006