When morning stars sing

Last summer before surgery, neighbors saw me out one morning and asked with some surprise in their voices and faces, "Did we see you running? Why are you running?" And my answer, which seemed obvious to me, "Because I can!"

Likewise this morning, had neighbors been about, they might have asked, "Why are you walking around your house in the semi-dark?" Because I wanted to be, and I could.

It was an early-to-work day for my husband, so I was on the deck in full dark, while I could still see some stars. Job's conversation with God came to mind. Job had heard all his comforters, and complained to God, and finally the thundering reply came, "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth...when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God sang for joy?"

Isn't that a wonderful image? There they were again on this particular morning, those morning stars, singing. As reliable as they'd been in my girlhood in all the clear pre-dawn mornings when I rose and went out to tend to my assigned work. I'm not sure why I was fetching up cows from the meadow in the morning, because my primary jobs related to the chickens, but I have those deep, deep muscle memories of cold and frost, and also of lush full summer, and the murmur of the Holsteins; and my own voice sing-songing in walking time (Uhpsey,Uuhpsay, come-on, come-on) to start them marching toward the barn; and the quiet, then, as we all moved patiently together in the calm, the soft sound of all the feet on the earth, accompanied by the song of the morning stars.

And then I got to experience dawn.

There's another song:

"On the road to Mandalay
Where the flying fishes play
And the dawn comes up like thunder
Out of China across the bay."

Poem written by Kipling, and made popular by Frank Sinatra's rendition of it into song, it's much longer than that verse used as refrain, of course. But it's the thunder image that's always puzzled me.

My own experience of dawn is of such a quiet, opening time. Except when there's literally that rare event, a dawn thunder storm. What is this dawn coming up like thunder? Is sunrise or sunset really different in other regions of the world? I've heard of sudden sunsets, too. So perhaps.

Every one of the sunrises and sunsets I've ever experienced has been a gradual, quiet event, the subtle colors shifting, shifting, shifting. In some sense, it does happen quickly, so that if I look away for even two minutes there's been an obvious change. But it's an event that takes place over quite a period of time, an hour or so, or an hour and a half, depending on what one chooses to count. And each particle of the entire environment is effected. One can easily not notice much from indoors. So this morning I had sufficient time, sufficient energy, sufficient desire to once again experience part of today's sunrise as a contact sport.

Outdoors, the full arc of sky is available; also the ground and all that's close thereto, newly growing; also the taller growing, the towering trees; also the voices of the summer birds returned; also and the twigs and leaves disturbed by the briefly quickened steps of the deer who noticed me and leaped up for a few steps before they said to themselves, "Oh, just her." (Or, if they were part of the formally trained English major herd, perhaps they said, "Oh, it is just she.")

This morning the sky wore scarves of pink. Yellow, purple and white crocus are in bloom, some of them little, some of them giants. Every year, a few crocus and daffodil plants appear in unexpected places. I suspect woodland critters transplant for me. It makes me laugh, a little joke in the springtime.

Like most mature people, I recognize I have some fear of the process of coming to my own death. Yet I am coming to trust that I will never be too old or infirm to notice and take joy in the beauty and mystery of the earth. Even if I were to be blind and deaf, park me in the sunshine so I may feel sun warmth on my skin. If I'm lucky, I'll always be awake enough to notice dawn and dusk and the little jokes of spring.