Meditation on Dirt
Meditation on Dirt
One morning I woke up wanting to see the sunrise. I don’t know the origin of this feeling, but since I’m easily swayed by my playful impulses I avoided asking myself any questions that could deter me from going on this fun little adventure. So as soon as my eyes opened, I gently slipped out of bed, careful not to wake my partner, and followed my convictions through the morning darkness.
Or at least I thought I was careful. My partner started to shuffle and mumble as I struggled to figure out which pant leg was left and which was right.
“Where are you going?”
“To see the sunrise.”
It was such a ridiculous quest at such an inconvenient hour that she didn’t ask any more questions, and instead went straight back to sleep.
The moment was near, and I was too excited to check the forecast so haphazardly tossed on my thin cycling jacket, and took the arduous trek to the lake — five minutes away. But by minute four or five I started to notice how thin my jacket was. The cold was unforgiving, but the comfort of being close to home gave me the courage to continue.
I found a simple bench planted on the horizon and all around me were other brave warriors (photographers), who’d also been summoned for the same quest. Some had their tripods out, pointed directly toward a blank space in the horizon. Others casually lounged on the coastline rocks with the DSLRs in hand. I took out my cell phone to fit in, but once I took a test shot of the lake and saw how pixelated the waves were I put it back in my pocket and waited. I waited and waited and waited, until it happened.
In Genesis, light is a spontaneous affair, a sudden invention, a combustion. After god made the earth he said let there be light, and so it was, as it had always been. And perhaps it’s a remnant of my childhood in Sunday school, or a reflection of my youthful impatience, but I imagined the sunrise to be something like this. A quick transition from dark to light, from nothingness to life. It wasn’t my first sunrise, but it had been so long since I’d seen it that I couldn’t recall exactly what it was like.
I forgot about the minutes before the sunrise when that inky azure that creeps up so slowly it feels foreboding. I forgot about those seconds before the sunrise, when the sky is licked by violet wisps, cerulean streaks, and an orange so deep it bleeds crimson. I was disoriented, and haunted by it all. For nearly three decades, I’d slept through this magnificent light show unfurling all around me. I’d like to say I didn’t let my self-pity ruin the moment, but it did a little.
The hypnotic tones soon dissipated, and a spirited beryl blue filled the sky as the sun started to peek over the edge of the horizon. I tried treasuring those few minutes when it was rising, but the light was blinding, and unless you wanted to risk sun blindness, you couldn’t look anymore. Once the sun showed, even just a little, it was all over. I sat there for a few minutes longer, watching the waves move in all directions, crashing into each other without the least bit of discretion, leaving whitecaps in their wake. The photographers did the same.
Days later, my little sister happened to be visiting me. There’s over a two decade age gap between us, but I figured the sunrise was an all ages attraction, so I took her to see it at the same spot that I had. While walking there I asked her questions about her past sunrises, and learned that this her first one. I was elated that I would be responsible for her first conscious memory of the sunrise, though it didn’t turn out quite as planned.
We sat there, and I had to keep talking it up to get her excited. She was of the age where she could be distracted by so much as a stray breeze so it was hard keeping her attention for those few minutes, an eternity in kid time, but then soon began.
She admired the colors as I did, and was delighted by the sun, but her interest soon waned and she hit me with the classic “Is it over yet?”
The sun started to inch over the horizon, a flurry of colors emerged and I kept looking over to her to see if she was as ecstatic as I was, but instead her eyes fixed on the ground. I tried to see what she was looking at, but there was nothing there.
“You’re missing the best part!”
She ignored me.
“C’mon you’re missing the sunrise.”
She looked at me with the utmost confidence and said “Yeah, but there’s all this dirt!”
I was incredulous. Dirt? You’re missing this cosmic marvel for some dirt? I didn’t say anything, but I felt a snarky comment rising up inside me. I was like a pretentious literary critic telling people the books they loved lacked grandeur. But then I watched her pick it up and throw it into the lake, laughing every time the grains rippled across the surface, and running through the resulting dust clouds. As much as I loved the sunrise, I can’t say it would ever bring me as much joy as dirt did for this little girl. How wonderful a world you must live in, where something so plentiful brings you so much pleasure. I put my ego aside, and let her happiness infect me. I smiled and began to pay more attention to her and the dirt as the sun quietly rose behind us. She kept playing and playing, and as messy as she got, I didn’t admonish her. After all, what kind of monster would I be for getting between a little girl and her dirt?
Finally when the sun was high in the sky and the underside of her nails were sufficiently brown, we left but on the way back she kept laughing and smiling. I asked her what she was looking at now and she pointed out something else. Something so small, so innocuous, that I must have passed by it a million times, even on my way to the sunrise. Something that I never noticed until now.