Greeting the Sunrise on Thanksgiving Day

“Oh, Sun! Let our good health continue. Give us all long life and happiness!"

Sunsets are relatively easy to photograph. Most everyone is up and about at that time, and you can get yourself into a good position to get a picture of it.

Sunrises are a different story. You have to be up: Get up, sleepyhead! And if you are up and you happen to see something magical occurring outside an upstairs window, you have to leave the room and find your phone and by the time you get back to it the light has changed and the moment is gone.

Unless a kind someone steps in and helps you out.

Sunrise, Benicia, California.

Sunrise begins the day, sunset ends it. One ushers in the light, darkness follows the other. There is a difference.

We have a friend in our little town who walks her two dogs every morning before light has captured the day. She wears a headlamp to see and be seen in the darkness. Even her dogs have lights attached to their collars.

At that time of day which is really still night the homes she passes are mostly dark and the streets are asleep. Very seldom do car headlights puncture the darkness, and almost never is anyone else out there besides the friends she walks with.

But there is plenty of activity nonetheless. The wild creatures of suburbia are on the prowl. Deer walking down the steps of a playground, raccoons disappearing into storm drains, coyotes skulking about, and oh yes, skunks. Stay away from them!

One of the best sights she sees—one of the reasons she gets up every morning in the cold dark—is the glistening sliver of red light that begins to emerge towards the end of every walk. Gotta have that, she says. Gotta see that. That is what starts the day for her.

Sunrise, Lahaina Harbor, Maui, before the fires.

Of course, sometimes the sun can be a rude and unwelcome guest. When you wake up with a hangover, or a restless night of non-sleep, or you have to get up and go to a job you’d rather not.

Or perhaps, like John Donne, you’re lying in bed with a beautiful woman and the last thing you want is for the glorious night to end and the drab day with all its burdens and duties to be forced upon the two of you.

“Busy old fool, unruly Sun,” he wrote, hoping to shoo it away for a little bit longer, “Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?” Donne wrote those words sometime around the year 1600. The sun was rising faithfully every day back then and it still is today.

It’s like that. The sun does its job, without complaint. Whether we notice it or not and frankly, most of us do not. It shows up. It punches the clock at the right time every day, rain or shine.

Here it comes! Again! Here comes the sun.

Sunrise, Zabriskie Point, Death Valley.

Though it doesn’t actually rise at all, does it? It is a source of constancy and stability. We’re the ones spinning around it like a child’s top.

They gave Galileo a hard time for pointing out that. No, we on planet earth are not the center of the universe. Lots of people today still have trouble with that concept.

Galileo lived in the same era as Donne, an English poet and Anglican pastor. In old English, the language Donne wrote in and spoke, our word for sun was spelled sonne. Sonne was also the word and spelling for the male child. Donne and other Christians would have understood the significance of the union of those two concepts—the Sonne Rising.

The Sun is at the center of many faiths, many religions. The Blackfeet were a Native tribe that lived in Montana (and their ancestors still do, on a reservation there). They were one of a group of three Plains tribes, including the Piegans and Bloods as they were called in the 1800s when buffaloes roamed the prairies in vast abundance and the white man and his Iron Horse had not yet arrived to wipe them out.

Hundreds of members of all three tribes, men, women and children, would come together yearly for what they called the “Sun Dance.” Their tipis were everywhere. They wore ceremonial dress, painted their bodies and faces, and sang and danced through the night in a communal act of worship, to give thanks to the Creator.

Cheyenne Sun Dancers, circa 1910. Edward S. Curtis Collection, Library of Congress.

A Blackfoot woman, name of Nat-ah-ki, participated in many Sun Dances in her lifetime with her husband, a white man who lived with her and adopted her tribe’s customs and ways. One time he shot a bear, which was a sacred animal to the Blackfeet, and before she touched it she said this prayer:

“Oh, Sun! Let my good health continue. Give us all, my man, my mother, my relatives, me, give us all long life and happiness. Let us all live to be old.”

Relish the day. A Happy Thanksgiving to all!