This Morning I Chased The Sunrise

This morning I chased the Sunrise. Unscrewing the Venetian blinds to survey the weather, I was assaulted with a colorful spray across the sky. Flamingo pinks and night-light oranges throbbed in the moguls of clouds on the Eastern horizon. I grabbed my coffee mug, flung my hood over my cold ears, and braved the early suburban outdoors. I walked quickly, urgently toward the scene. A woman stood motionless on her porch, staring in the direction of my pilgrimage. The skyline is a daze, a confusion. An almost violent explosion of unnecessary beauty, grandeur. I had been reading about Queen Esther, about Mordecai’s honored procession through the city on the back of the king’s horse, trailing the king’s robe behind him. This is how the king honors those who delight him. Miles above me, last night’s late-coming clouds trail the king’s watercolor robe behind them, in a seemingly depthless procession. The train of it fills the sky temple with glory. Atmospheric smoke surrounds.

The cold startles me out of this. I turn around, resolved to like beauty more. And the wool-thick clouds over the pacific ocean that had been a wet-cement grey several minutes ago have illuminated, as if by fragrant choirs of fuchsia tulips whose music and scent have been transposed into color, for those of us who see. This startles me once more, and my eyes are wide. I shake my head for the rest of the walk back to my front door, shake it at the superfluity of this drama. Over the top are you, sky, this morning. For some reason I feel unworthy to ingest any more of this beauty, and I stare at the sidewalk for the last few steps. But yesterday’s rain has left a long streak of puddle on the ground in front of me, whose reflection the tulip pink clouds overwhelm. It looks like someone has spilled a gluttonously large strawberry milkshake across the sidewalk. It adorns, on purpose, the grey cement with accidental beauty, just like the sky above me.

The Raw World Text

Allow me to share with you an excerpt from Annie Dillard's "Living By Fiction" which I finished this morning.

"Can we not loose the methods of literary criticism upon the raw world? May we not analyze the breadth of our experience? We can and may--but only if we first consider the raw world as a text, as a meaningful, purposefully fashioned creation, as a work of art. For we have seen that critics interpret artifacts only. Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial filmmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer...

This, clearly, would be a religious, even creationist, reading of the universe. Note how it differs from pantheism. It reads the universe as a significant art object, not as part of a stream of being which includes the observer, and not as personal message. Pantheism is not the only meaningful reading of the natural world. One need not find a spirit in each bush and rock for these things to mean. The bush and rock may be, as it were, literary symbols. But of what? If we could only see the first draft, or locate some letters!" (Dillard 144).