The pre-dawn hour has arrived in Humptulips County, and the sky is just beginning to brighten. The sun is still concealed behind the eastern mountains, but just enough sunlight is leaking over their tops to provide a red, rose and blue background for the trees and taller bushes, for anything high enough to reach these still vagrant rays of sunshine. The leakage of stray light beams has become strong enough to provide an assured outline of these taller things, but is not yet strong enough to reveal any of their detail, for this is the hour of morning’s silhouette.
Birds have awakened to cheer on the sun’s rising, to make it welcome by means of an earth song so ancient as to have been shared by my ancestors as far back as my particular string of ‘greats extends. I can well imagine the first conscious soul within my ancestry, the Most Ancient One, similarly worshipping the sun’s rising to the cadence of bird song, enthralled in wonderment at this conjoined majesty of sun, bird, song and life in all of its various forms, and worshipping this moment as the font of creation. Whomever his gods may have been, whatever his gods may have stood for, the sun was surely among their foremost.
I, too,worship the sunrise on this early summer’s morning, sharing kinship with that long ago ancestor by means of this most basic and ancient of earthly glories. How amazing it is that we two can share this moment together in my imagination, the dead and the living bound by this single shared experience, by our shared wonder, all the while divided by the vagaries of language, dress, culture, tools, religion, education, science, distance, and time, by our very different sensibilities as to what it means to be human!
And as the two of us, the Most Ancient One and I, stand here together, holding hands across the eons, all of those in between us come out from behind the silhouette’s edge to join in this daily celebration of bounty, of grace, of life: my father and mother waving to me from just beyond its boundary as if to remind me that while I, too, will all too soon share their side of the equation, it only takes one living person with memory to balance the weight of all their shades; to remind me that I am not to be dismayed by the prospect of death, for there, on the other side of the morning’s silhouette, lies just another kind of life.
I take comfort in knowing that my sons and their children have already joined alongside of the Most Ancient One and me in this daily celebration of sunlight, and that when I cross over the silhouette’s boundary they, in turn, will take up the Most Ancient One’s hand from across the eons, will assume the burden of bearing the memory necessary to balance the ancestral scales, will stand proudly in the sunlight as I wave to them from the shade.
Heavy, provocative original thoughts! But, have we all understood, it is we who are the ancient ones.