This morning I worked an hour and a half of credit time. I’m going to DC this coming week for six days and will miss work Tuesday-Friday. Slowdive is playing a concert on Wednesday and I’m celebrating six months with the Social Security Administration by taking my first vacation. By working today, I increased my credit hours to 24, which means I can use credit hours instead of annual leave for three of the four days I’ll miss of work.
I’m beyond excited for the show, but I’m also thrilled to see some good friends in Washington. My good buddy from Wyoming will go with me to see Slowdive, but I’m also going to see some close friends from the Peace Corps, including an original sitemate I have not seen since she left Ukraine in July 2012. I’m so happy to reconnect with important people who’ve been missing in my life.
Because I’ll miss four days of work, I also went in today to complete some things I’m working on. I set my alarm for 7:30 am, thinking I’d sleep in and get to work at 8:30. Instead, by body’s natural rhythm kicked in and by five o’clock, I couldn’t sleep any longer. So I went in at 7:15.
That sounds early for a Saturday, but getting there so early meant I got to see the sunrise, as I try to do as often as possible. Some days I miss it, others the clouds obscure it, but every time I do witness the sun rise over the horizon seems like a miracle, and the 11th floor of the Strom Thurmond Federal Building offers an unrivaled view. Watching, unobstructed, above the treeline and building tops, as the inky black softens into first a pale purple, then lightening to almost lilac before the sun’s imminent crest takes the sky through the range of red and orange, and then as the ball of fire pops above where earth meets sky–it is beautiful.
I love the colors.
As I’ve watched, the sun is moving along the horizon, and every day it comes later. In just under three weeks, we’ve lost nearly a quarter of an hour to the night.
Sunrise 10/01, 7:18 am…
10/18, at 7:31 and noticeably further south…
It is true, the morning will soon retake an hour of daylight when daylight savings arrives, and I will probably miss a few sunrises until they get back to 6:45 again, but eventually, I’ll be able to resume my viewing. Anyway, I feel fortunate to have seen it today, even on a Saturday from work.
The colors the sun produces on rising and setting truly are beautiful. I love early mornings and the dusk because of the lovely colors that exist in those times. Driving through farmlands as the sky turns those shades of orange-red, and the softening of the light into hues of purple is one of my favorite things; I am always glad to view landscapes through such lenses. (One of my fondest memories of Ukraine is a bus trip from Dnepropetrovsk across Ukraine’s flat, open center to Kirovograd as the day passed from afternoon to night.)
But the reflection of the bright midday light of the pink churches in Columbia and the green leaves of the oak trees in their cemeteries where I come to sit and read are also wonderful.
First Presbyterian Church, Columbia, SC…
The play of shadow and sunlight among the tombstones adds to the peaceful atmosphere as I read or journal. Some of those leaves are progressing through their own paths of color, independent from the sun’s presence, as autumn gently turns them from greed to red.
The play of shadow and light…
And yet their changing colors are not free of the sun’s light. Photosynthesis teaches us that plants gain energy through the absorption of light. Chlorophyll in the leaves most strongly absorbs light in the blue and red spectrum, but is a poor absorber of green light. That is why leaves are green in the spring and summer, when chlorophyll is most plentiful in leaves. When autumn arrives and the leaves cease producing chlorophyll, the leaves stop absorbing the other colors of light and the leaves change, liberated from chlorophyll’s grasp.
In the same way, the universe exists, in reality, without color. Those hues of purple and orange at the dawn are merely our perception of how the world around us appears. The church in front of me is not pink, my shoes are not black, the grass not green. We see the colors of these things because those are the spectrums of light that the matter these things consist of cannot absorb. Over time, humans’ eyes evolved in a manner that allows us to experience color. Our eyes work with our brains to perceive hues from the light not consumed by matter. Just think of viewing these things at nighttime without the sun’s illumination.
Where are their vibrant colors, hidden by the night?
Evolution gave other animals the ability to see in the dark. Ours did not. Nature is a mysterious and wonderful thing.
We need the sun, and so I am thankful for the beauty it creates and the color in its light.