1.1 Breaking Dawn

I know what you're thinking and no, my first miniproject isn't reading Stephanie Meyer's infamously bad final installment of the Twilight saga (although I am filing this away, with intrigue and a smirk).

Instead, I thought it would be cute to kick off my Project by doing three days of watching the sun rise at the point. So instead of taking a nap right now--which is what I really want to do--I will take a few notes.

Something I didn't know about the sunrise, though I guess it's sort of intuitive, is that it crawls forward a minute or two every day. At least it does at this time of year. This morning it was 6:41AM, tomorrow it's supposed to be 6:39AM and Sunday it's 6:38AM. I usually wake up at 7AM, so waking up at 6 wasn't devastating but it was a little jarring. I threw on a hat and a hoodie and all the necessary layers and got out the door in fifteen minutes or so.

Once I got outside I wasn't tired anymore, in the get-back-in-bed way. I haven't really thought about this before, but in paying attention this morning it's really only the prying-yourself-out-of-bed part that's awful and inhuman about getting up early. After that things become mechanic. So the next time you set an alarm early only to throw it against the wall and roll over, instead promise yourself that if you're still feeling tortured 15 minutes after getting out of bed you can go back to sleep. Odds are you'll feel fine by then.

I thought it would be really dark out, but actually it's never really dark out in a city. The sun was 20 minutes away from coming up and was spilling its early gradient lighter blues all over everything, but the ubiquitous all-night street lights and apartment building lights and other kinds of lights made it all a little less exciting. We're not exactly Stone Age.

But in a way, 6:20AM kind of is Stone Age, because no one is outside walking around and things are quiet. And when you're walking out of dark blue toward a growing hot pink on the horizon, it feels like the oldest church ceremony in the world. It's a big production, sunrise.

One day in India a couple years ago we went to go "watch the sunrise" over a hill outside Pune, but what we actually saw when we got there was a dark blue get absorbed by a light gray-blue. The sun had "risen" without anyone realizing it happened. It just suddenly wasn't night anymore.

Given Chicago's attachment to gray skies, I feared that might happen, but instead it was a fiery show of purple-magenta, that, as I watched it, literally overtook everything. I sat right at the point of Promontory Point, and the sun was directly in my line, though I was freezing. I saw it along with a couple of joggers and someone walking a dog. I rejected popular wisdom and stared at the sun for a few minutes, and looking away left the slime-green image of a circle on everything for a while.

And then I left. That was it. I tried to drink water but all the fountains at the Point were shut off for winter. My thighs and nose were pointedly freezing--bright red, I realized after getting home, and my shower stung. But when I was getting dressed my room seemed different subtly, in a way that was satisfying. I was somewhere different and unusual and striking for the morning and then back in my room getting dressed, having spent the morning in some kind of ritual.

That was the most noticeable thing about it--it felt like a sort of spiritual ritual. For a million years people have gotten up with the fuzzy blue gradients and turned to pay the sun its due every morning before getting back to whatever they were doing. People don't often look at the sun anymore. But like I said... it feels like the oldest church ceremony in the world.