I spent some time watching the sunrise this morning.
It was only a few minutes, because people got places to be, always and also…anxiety, but I watched it, this winter spectacle with its array of orange fanning across the clouds. This is the secret: winter sunrises–the most painful to leave bed for, the hardest to get to, the darkest before they’ve dawned–they are the best sunrises.
These days, I choose to see winter sunrises. But so much of the beauty in my life I have witnessed by grace’s coercion. It just won’t take no for an answer when there’s life-altering, breathtaking beauty involved.
“Why do we do this to ourselves?” a friend and I commiserated over text before we convened with a group of other moms on a winter’s night over pizza and wine and felt grateful we had done this to ourselves, marvelling at friendship on the way to our warm beds, and after I dropped her and headed home alone I watched the nearly-full moon hang golden and low in the sky.
“Why do I do this to myself?” I cursed as I stuffed myself into the wetsuit inside my car while the heater blasted and the water churned, waiting, and only once I was in it and my face unfroze did I remember the singular clarity of the sea in the winter.
“You have to be his inner voice,” the book on autism instructed in a way I would have heard as overwhelming law not too long ago, but in that moment I laughed at the recognition of the way I was told to do that before he was speaking–to narrate everything–and how I’m still doing it, and how we are all made to do things we never expected but are somehow being prepared for even when we didn’t know it.
“I felt I had been brought into the world,” Lucy Barton narrates about a moment in New York and, reading the words, I knew I’d lived them too, in that same place that I felt driven to when I’d run out of other options and, once there, had come to life myself. How many had told me not to go and how much would not exist if I’d listened, and how later her mother says to her, “Look at your life right now. You just went ahead and…did it,” and I think about how it’s the same for me except…I was kind of pushed into it, by relentless grace that forced me into every place where I’ve been brought into the world, into life: relationships, cities, countries, waters, moments.
And today, both kids are home sick, and they’re dancing around the living room while I try to think and write and we all sniffle our way through this part of winter, and I’ll wait as always for the beauty of the moment to show up, now or later or much later, whenever the sun finally rises, and I can finally see.