My First Sun Rise

watching the whole miraculous event.

I don’t think I’ve ever properly watched it before. This must be the case, because surely I’d remember something like that. Oh, I’ve seen it in various stages, for sure, I’ve looked over and gone, “There’s the sunrise!” but that’s quite a broad term, as it goes. To actually see the sun rise, to stand still in a frosty field and watch as the top of the ball appears on the horizon, to then feel as if the earth is tilting so fast you might roll off, but to feel gravity hold firm, to watch as the rest of the bright orb is revealed, yes that is a whole other thing.

It made me laugh out loud in wonder. I was entirely alone, bar a light on in an upstairs room of a farmhouse nearby. I couldn’t look at the sun itself for very long before it became painfully bright, and instead I looked at the surrounding clear sky as it moved through hues of pink and orange to perfect blue, then other shades of perfect blue. When the sun was almost completely revealed I carried on running, laughing again as I ran downhill and reversed some of the sun’s rise.

It all felt very “intentional”. It felt meaningful, it set the tone for how the day should proceed. You can’t stand and watch something like that and then go about your day without being affected somehow. But maybe that intentionality started before the sunrise itself: it started with choosing to go out at all. I was just awake so early, alert with the first light streaming through a crack in my bedroom door. I made coffee and did a few exercises to warm up my back and legs - a necessity nowadays - and as the first light got brighter, I chased after it.

I darted out across Corsham Park with frost underfoot - a very welcome relief from the quagmires of mud I’ve been navigating for weeks. The sky may say spring but the ground still says winter. I gasped at the mist rising from the lake, the ducks frosted over, the vapour blurring into the phenomenal amber and fuchsia glow of that coming force, that sun, is it here already, am I missing it, is it just obscured by trees?

I pressed on, expecting to have missed the crucial moment, but as I sprang over a low fence and through a gate, I saw that I was right on time.

I wasn’t cold as I stood there. I was absolutely fine.

How can that be - how can I have lived for 34 years and have no memory of ever watching it like this before? Sunsets, at least a hundred. Surely at least a thousand. But the magnificent dawning of the day? Uncertain.

Well. There will be no doubt about it now.

I took no photos of the sunrise - I ran without my phone, and wanted to experience it properly anyway - so here’s a photo from a few days later of some lambs.