Sunrise

(Quite out of character, but I stayed up through the night to study. Usually sleep claims me by 1am but I felt troubled, with no inclination to shrug off my socks and climb into bed. To cut a long exposition short, I took a mat and sat out on the little balcony that overlooks some houses, hills and trees in the background, a thin line where a train sometimes runs rimming the edge of the horizon. Anyway, I was going to try to find stillness but instead I found my mind full of words. So I wrote them down.) 

When I was young I would dedicate three or four days of the year to watch the sun rise. It was my own ritual, quietly kept to read books whilst the world went dark and stars dotted the night. I would wait to see the sun rise. 

Now sunsets, oh they're glorius, thrashing wild beauties that sink gingerly into the night with the weight of the day on their shoulders. They're noisy and the song changes from cacophony to stillness. But give me a cool sunrise, the world waking up- again. 

The sky starts as a dark blue that fades softly, slowly. White but also every colour seeps in, bleeding into the morning. Lavender on the smoggy horizon, grey just by the distant outlines of pylons, rippled streaks of amber gilt the tree sihouettes. The morning songs are beautiful against the cerulean tipped sky. 

Even as your teeth begin to clatter involuntarily against the cool breeze that wraps your naked legs in goosebumps and the birds cry out at each other and the hadedas begin to screech, even as your heart feels restless because the world seems so so dark- it's ok. 

The day is new. Hope lives on. The dip in the darkness does not last. 

(My heart goes out to all those affected by the tragedies of terror. Not just Paris, but also Beirut, Nigeria, Syria, Lebanon and to any place that has been touched by the abomination that is hate masquerading as salvation. The day will be new, hope is as renewing as the sun. Sunrise will come, it always does.)