Sunrise

There are rather abstract lists in diaries, calendars and ships' tables called Sunrise and Sunset, where specific times are shown and change by some two minutes a day. Here in the high mountain valley (at a magical 1111 metres) I have a different measure. Every notch and peak in the surrounding mountains is like the markings of a clock, and you watch the sunrise shifting along its annual trajectory, with the rays striking, slanting, each morning in a slightly different place. It seems that many ancient and indigenous civilisations in the Americas used mountain peaks and dips in the same way as markers of the sun's annual passage. Naturally, when the sunrise reaches the end of its run on the horizon, its point of stop-and-return -- the solstice -- this time and place can be marked in the very landscape. This is how you make a calendar of stones.

The sun not only rises higher and  higher daily at this time. It also comes nearer to you. A week ago I would not have had the sun in my eyes at this morning hour, around 8.15. I've been watching its brightness, though, for days as it crept across the grassy slopes, nearer and nearer, earlier and earlier, finding its way towards me with its blessing of resurrection after a long winter.

Needless to say, you don't have to live at the top of a mountain to live through that same warming moment in springtime, when the sun's rays arrive to brighten a windowsill or a patch of wall or a pillow. Think of the joy expressed by Puccini's music as Mimi sings of how her poor attic room high up in the city is the first to be touched by the returning sun:

Vivo sola, soletta
là in una bianca cameretta:
guardo sui tetti e in cielo;
ma quando vien lo sgelo
il primo sole è mio
il primo bacio dell'aprile è mio!

I live by myself, all alone,
in my little white room.
I look upon the roofs and the sky.
But when the thaw comes,
the first warmth of the sun is mine,
the first kiss of April is mine!

La Bohème Act 1


CJM