Sunrise

This beautiful photograph, Dawn Comes to Greywolf, is by Marti deAlva one of our Killdeer Artisan Guild members and a regular contributor to exhibits at Hangin Art Gallery.    Living in Montana it is easy to take beautiful landscape photographs because everywhere you look there is incredible beauty in nature.   One of Marti's great gifts is her capacity to capture the intimacy of this vast landscape.   Her "feel" for light gives her photography a luminescence that defies description.

So this morning watching a beautiful Western Montana sunrise and that faithful sun made its way above the Rocky Mountains, my heart did some singing and I thought of Marti's photography.   Made me want to share her perspective on our valley (yes, this is right here where we live) and I'm hoping she won't mind that I didn't ask her permission first.

Light.    I never realized how important it is to me until I began to spend winters in Western Montana where the fall comes and then the winter and we can go weeks without seeing the sun, immersed in what they call inversions here.   We know there is sun and blue sky somewhere over those inverted clouds and it takes all of my faith to believe I will see it again.   When I do I remember the joy that comes from a beautiful sunrise and a bright blue sky winter day.    We have one of those today and I can feel all the muscles in my chest and back and neck relaxing.   Last March I went to New York and while the temperatures were cold just like here in Montana, the sun was shining every day and I realized how very much I miss that!

And then again, the winters here help me to realize how much I value those clear, sunny, bright days.   And I think sometimes life is like that.   They say familiarity breeds contempt.   I think worse than that, both familiarity and too much busy-ness in our days, dulls our awareness.    Like an internal "inversion".   Our beautiful bright awareness is somewhere out there, but not visible to us.

I started this blog by saying that my commitment for this year (and hopefully the rest of my life!) is to engage being more fully human.   And I can't think of a better way to do that than making a commitment to awareness.   To receiving the grace all around me, regardless of whether or not the sun is shining.   A dear spiritual mentor used to remind me frequently that God is everything, not just the good stuff.

So I am going to enjoy the "sunrise" in every day and every moment, even the ones that don't feel like "the good stuff".   And my guess is, that the discipline to choose to see beauty everywhere, will make my world and my days pretty sunny and bright!

Donna