Those who know me understand that I am a morning person, and that by “morning” I especially mean the pre-dawn hours. In considering my preference, most of my friends focus on the fact that I go to bed earlier than many rather than ask themselves why I might prefer morning to other times of day. Some of the explanations I might offer might well have something to do with chemistry, psychology or how my nervous system is hard-wired. While I have read several books on body rhythms and am certain that the explanations in these texts have some relevance to my preference for mornings, none of the scientific explanations they contain explain the joy mornings bring to me.
The truth is that mornings exhilarate me. I derive enormous satisfaction from the morning’s chill bite and the growing of the light as it rises and suffuses color throughout the landscape. I revel in the feeling of privacy that comes from being awake in an increasingly vibrant world while most others are slumbering. At my Humptulips County farm, mornings reveal rabbits, deer, and birdsong and shed light upon all of the various vegetational rustlings that add so much mystery to the dark. During my city mornings, the sea-salt laden air mixes with the cries of gulls as I enjoy a chill-enriched, coatless walk while wondering whether my fellow insomniacs-of-the-morning have any other purpose to their perambulations than simple enjoyment of the moment.
In particular, there is nothing more pleasing than a full moon in pre-dawn Summer light. Light suffuses the landscape and sky during these minutes, even though the sun has not yet risen above the horizon. In this setting, the full moon is spectacular – a hardened yellow disk glaring at the landscape, daring the sun to rise and obliterate it. In contrast, the landscape, colored in soft pastels, seems fresh and innocent and awaits its impending advent. While all pre-dawn light comes from the sun, it is a fullsome mixture of moonlight and the steeper rays of an as-yet hidden sun seeping over the world’s rim – a truly unique mixture of indirect and reflected sunlight.
Summer’s pre-dawn period lasts only for minutes, and as those minutes swiftly pass by something startling happens – the moon fades briskly from view as the atmosphere thickens and hides its aspect from Earth, and the landscape’s true colors assert themselves from out of the pastel haze in which they were hiding. In other words, the moon and the Earth quickly swap prominence of place in a ritual changing-of-the-guard: one by fading quickly from view even while asserting itself to its utmost ability, and the other by rising and firming slowly from the night’s haze to eventually reveal itself in all of its dimension, depth of color and glory.
The process of morning is in sharp contrast to a Summer evening’s slow aggrandizement. Over the hours of a Summer evening, night grows organically from the shadows as they accumulate and knit themselves together. Night is the finished product of their knitting, and the reality of the moon’s and the stars’ permanent presence in our firmament is only gradually revealed as Earth’s atmosphere becomes increasingly transparent. As pleasant as a Summer evening’s progress may be, it is, to me, more of a magician’s sleight of hand than the sudden, magical transference of heavenly power that occurs each morning.
Daily visual evidence proves to me that there are fewer morning people than evening people, a difference which suggests that far fewer have experienced morning’s salute than evening’s somnolence. Consequently, I doubt I have much hope of converting evening people to morning people by the simple exposition of the joys of a Summer morning, but I do hope that some of you might, because of this piece, think to rise up early one morning to experience the pre-dawn hours.
I urge all of my readers who are evening people to enjoy at least one pre-dawn moment either by practicing Tai Chi in a city park, walking amid the susurrus of an ocean beach, listening to the “plink” of wavelets in a rural lake while sitting on a dock, or simply drinking in the salt-tanged air of the streets of your favorite port city. In those moments, and in those places or in others you might imagine for yourself, you will find amazing things highlighted by the rising sun.
