A Sunrise – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week on the Wednesday Blog, a reflection on the rising Sun.
Last Friday as I drove south to reach my classroom in the morning I was awed by the pink and yellow rays of the rising Sun that appeared in the east. It seemed to echo some sort of hope of things to come. These last months have felt as though I’ve been caught up in a storm both unfamiliar and of my own shaping, and it has left much of my life from my part time work to even this Wednesday Blog to be written at the eleventh hour each week. Unable to set foot on solid ground over these months, I’ve prioritized staying upright in my life while putting my best efforts into my work. Still, even that hasn’t seemed to be enough to balance everything.
I am more used to the pattern of having several part-time jobs which fit together however imperfectly, so the introduction of a full-time position on top of everything else sank all those other things that I previously worked on to the detriment of all. There were weeks when I even ignored my own needs as my new duties required every shred of focus, every aspiration of my emotions. This has left me exhausted of many of the things which kept me going and I feel hollowed out by the harsh tides of the world.
This sunrise then spoke to me of hope. It was a sunrise that only the long nights of winter could forebode, a bright eastern glow whose radiance was more pronounced because it followed a long, dark night. I gazed up at it when I could on my drive south and thought of all that had transpired, and all the possible futures that these next months and years might hold. I know, of course, that the Sun appears to rise as our planet continues in its revolutionary course, the Earth spinning on its axis with each passing day so that this sunrise has surely been seen by many before and will indeed return again to grace our mornings. Yet amid all that the sciences can tell my emotions speak louder in my interpretation of its very natural phenomena.
There have been many sunrises in my life that have moved me, after all I’m traditionally far more a night owl than an early bird, so until recently I rarely saw the sunrise. In my childhood my bedroom looked out to the west and each evening was warmed in the glow of the setting sun. With all our popular fears and worries about endings today, they are far louder than any wonderings about new beginnings, it seems that we as a civilization looks to the setting more than the rising Sun. We see our future as a fading echo of distant glories, our lives existing in the ruined monuments of earlier generations. Our stories are populated with more Ozymandiases and fewer Abrahams and Jacobs in spite of the newness of so much of our built world here in the Americas and the other old settler colonies.
I think our transition from the early decades of this new century into the first of the middle decades has a great deal to do with all of this. The generations now being born will surely see the last century as something in the past existing behind a veil just remote enough to not be touched. When I show pictures from my travels of old monuments today my audience and I are both struck that often they were infants or even yet to be born in that same moment. The first decades of this century are to them what the 1970s and 1980s are to me; and as we continue our inevitable march forward in time we will move ever further away from those years and generations in which our world here in the United States, and especially here in the Great Plains and West, was still young. It seems to me that we have a great deal to learn of change; that we will always need a reminder that the passage of time is something to be admired as much as it is feared. The oldest people I knew as a child would now be reaching their centenary if they were still alive, and surely someday I too will be in that moment where the power of my life fades as my time recedes from life and into memory.
The rising Sun speaks to me then of both hope and the truth that after many sunrises there will be one which will be seen in a moment when my world and all who I know are gone. There will be a sunrise after my time, yet in the meantime I hope I can make all the days that follow the sunrises of my life fruitful. With that light there are a great many things I can see, a great many marvels to behold; for all of us are individual marvels in all our complexity, our wants, our passions, and our fears. As long as I am able, I yearn to experience those marvels like that pink and yellow sunrise from a few days ago and live to the fullest of my ability.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 