The Speed of Sunrise

My faith is held together by wonder—by every defiant commitment to presence and paying attention. I cannot tell you with precision what makes the sun set, but I can tell you how those colors, blurred together, calm my head and change my breath. I will die knowing I lived a faith that changed my breathing. A faith that made me believe I could see air.
Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us (New York: Convergent, 2022), 29, 30–31, 41

This past Saturday morning, I saw something I had never seen before.  At one of my normal morning walking places, I saw this sunrise.  I had seen sunrises similar to this before but I had not seen a sun pillar (that’s the official meteorological term) like this before - bright pink shining in the middle of the sunrise.  It was so beautiful.  Scout and I just sat at this spot for about 15 minutes until the sun pillar faded away.

It also was a significant morning because I was a few hours away from two funerals of two amazing, dear women.  The beauty of that sunrise and that sun pillar felt like a deep gift.  I don’t want to go so far as to say that it was a gift from Lisa and Bonnie but I definitely was holding them close at that moment.  In fact, if this moment had been only a few months before, I probably would have sent these photos to each of them.

But the other part from the morning was that while we sat there, I set up my phone and mini tripod (once again, thanks Peak Design!) and videoed the moment - the rippling water, the moving clouds, the slowly shifting colors.  When I watched the video later, I noticed that at normal speed, it is hard to notice the motion of the clouds and the colors but the movement of the water is so very obvious.  But when I sped it up to 3x speed, it was so clear the movement of the clouds and shifts of colors (and of course the faster movement of the water).  All were beautiful in their own way and all touched my heart. The wonder in the speed of sunrise.