WARMING IN THE SUN

The best thing about these recent chilly mornings is that when you sit in the rising sun warming up, it feels so good.

Last Monday morning it was 48°F (9°C) at dawn, which for these parts was very cold. I sat in a forest clearing facing the sun as it rose. A bright, silvery aura surrounded the sun the way it does when air is so saturated with humidity that fog could form at any moment. When I exhaled, amazingly expansive puffs of swirling steam billowed from my lungs, rising as they dissipated. My steamy breath was back-lighted by the sun so it showed up uncannily white, seeming super-charged with energy and motion. I could blow my breath in roiling swirls six feet away, like a fire-breathing dragon!

All around my steam-play, sunlight exploded in dewdrops and made spider gossamers draped over grassblades into translucing streaks of light. Melodious Blackbirds, Social Flycatchers and a lone Turquoise-browed Motmot called and a light breeze stirred, from time to time casting to the ground a brown, dried leaf whose time had come.

In this sparkling, animated world only I sat unmoving, dark and quiet.

The moment lasted for less than ten minutes. Then the temperature must have risen, lowering the relative humidity so that my breath no longer formed fog, and dew burned off the landscape. In such a brief time the grass and weeds lost their sparkling dewdrops, spiderwebs ceased their shining, and the birds moved on. The landscape assumed the somberness that until then only I had carried inside.

Standing, looking around, suddenly I realized that the light and movement and music weren't gone at all, but that rather they had been imparted into me.

In fact, all day long I carried within me that morning's rising sun. Everything I did I did buzzing inside with clouds of radiantly charged spirit, being translucently satisfied with things as they were.

I hope that in your own life you have a time and a place where on chilly mornings you can warm yourself in the rising sun, and receive those gifts of Nature that are freely given..