That’s my friend Kim, with a sunrise on her face.

Hang on…

Oh, here we go.

This sunrise…

I know.

It was pretty great.

We’d been talking about sunrises and sunsets the night before, and realized that we are both passionately sunrise people.

Okay. We realized we are both sunrise junkies.

We agreed that sunsets are absolutely gorgeous, and calming, and romantic, and other flattering adjectives.

But sunrises?

Sigh.

How can you beat the brightly lit promise of a brand new day?

We weren’t poo-pooing sunset people, not at all. I mean, some of our best friends are sunset people. No, we swear!

But back to sunrises…

I’ve written about opening my eyes to the frozen silence of a winter’s morning, and seeing the sky streaked in the purples and pinks of pre-dawn. More times than I can count, I’ve tripped down the stairs, grabbed my camera, carefully opened the front door, and made it more than a dozen steps into the dark before noticing I’d forgotten not only a coat, but shoes… more than once I realized both these things as I stood in the snow.

The thing is, every time… every single time… that fiery orb rises above the horizon, I am left with a sense of breathless wonder.

In sunset, we are… literally… spinning away from the light.

But to get to sunrise?

We have to spin toward it.

I embrace the idea of leaning into, and sitting with, life’s tough stuff… including the toughest of tough. To spend time looking these beasts in the eye, eventually putting away my defensive weaponry, and learning how to work them into my days and years, accepting the changes and lessons they bring.

It only makes sense then, I think, that I’m also particularly partial to the idea of spinning toward each new day for what it might offer. Taking time to let the wonder and awe of its happening sink in… floating on the hope that this day will be somewhere between ‘better than the one before’ and ‘greater than I could possibly imagine’.

I do not hold these two behaviors as mutually exclusive, by the way. I have undertaken both in the midst of my own life’s worst storms, and eventually the winds have yielded.

Then there’s the whole overwhelming gratitude thing. The feeling that makes my eyes a bit sweaty with each sunrise I get to see when I set the alarm in my head for ‘wicked early’.

All the possibilities of a new day’s birth are interwoven with the golden threads of faith and hope.

And, if we screw up this day?

We are but one earth’s spin away from another lifting of the curtain.

Thanks for readin’.

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