Drawn In
I was going to say that, the other day, I watched the sun rise. But, I find that that is not quite accurate. That I was drawn into the sunrise strikes me as more precise.
There were things I meant to be doing. Dishes to attend to. A table to wipe down. Instead, I stood in the stillness, watching the sky’s subtle shifts in hue and tone.
The window was open. The air was a palpable presence as it slipped past my cheeks. It was warm enough to feel the edges of cold that still remained in it.
Birds alit on the tips of bare branches, only to flit away again.
Recycling cascaded into a truck somewhere nearby.
A church bell clanged.
When the slow revelation was over and the sky settled in to a miraculous blue, I returned to my day, only to realize I’d spent 15 minutes at the window without noticing the time go by.
This felt completely different than losing 15 minutes to my phone. Although there was a definitive sense of returning, I didn’t feel like I had left reality. This was an experience of sinking deeper into reality, not out of it or into an alternative. I felt more open and more attuned.
As I consider what accounts for that difference, it strikes me as important that the sun doesn’t need anything from me. It doesn’t rise in order to make me stare at it. It isn’t trying to influence me in any way. It isn’t A/B testing which colors are the most stop-what-you’re-doing-and-get-caught-up-in-the-sunrise worthy.
It rises whether I watch it or not. Indeed, it is quite oblivious to my watching. Its behavior is not changed based on my behavior.
There is something very analog about that.
It did not feel like a coincidence that evening when, as I sat at the dinner table, my view out the window was of a brilliant full moon hanging enormous in the sky. Clouds skirted across its surface as it brushed passed the tops of the trees. Then they cleared, allowing its full moon glory to shine into the surrounding clouds, creating a cradle of illumination. Though it was not a new moon it did look literally new, as though it was an entirely novel incarnation of itself. It was regal, unselfconsciously so.