Sunrise Vulnerabilties
Today I woke before sunrise (strangely I was just talking with a friend yesterday about how great watching the sun rise is, and yet how rarely we both did so). The morning sun touched my wounds as it came up, I felt such a vulnerability and sorrow. I watched and listened to a blackbird, silhoutted against a slowly brightening sky, and wondered how it would be for him to wake and sing each morning like that. Does he feel afraid of the dark, and is joyful for the return of daylight? Is he lonely, one bird against a backdrop of others, singing out their own songs, but somehow making no connection with others? Or does he call out to a mate he has not met, hoping she will find him, because he has the feeling to do it?
These are projections of course, my thoughts and feelings given to the bird. I am sure he lives in complete peace, connected as he is to Nature’s cycles, and to deep instincts without a rational mind to wonder “should I being doing this?”
Like most people, I’ve had disappointments in my life. I have grown and developed as a person, and I have learned that attitude and my own perspective makes a huge difference in how I feel and how I perceive events that happen to me. Disappointment is no longer just pain and sorrow, it is simply a change of plan. If things go differently to how I wanted them to go, I see that perhaps I could work harder at it, to make it happen, or perhaps I could let it go, trusting that things are better this way than how I wanted them to be. That may work for the present and the recent past, but what of things that happened when I had no such insight? When wishing things to be different crushed me and battered me under cliff-side waves?
Those pains are still with me, though I rarely acknowledge them. The sunrise gently opened these wounds, reminding me of that sorrow that I have found strangely comforting. I can go back and see these things in a new light, but I can also use this sorrow to open my heart in compassion. To experience pure sorrow gives rise to a deep tenderness if we allow it, as it softens our usually robot-like armour, and that is a great gift.
I know that when the day is here fully, when the sun is higher in the sky and the day has begun in earnest, these feelings of vulnerability will fade. But I am grateful for this experience, and I hope to bring the tenderness of heart with me, so that I will be a gentle soothing touch to the people in my life, and a comforting voice to the frightened child inside each of us.
“But I don’t mind the dark discovering the day, because the night is a beautiful bright blue and grey.” - from ‘Goodnight L.A.’, by Counting Crows.