sunrise.
/Even after all this time,
the sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.
-Hafiz
I moved this summer, to an apartment within a residence hall in Downtown Portland. Not that my previous apartment — one within a residence hall in Northeast Portland — had me that much more connected to the Earth, but this move seemed to take me just a bit farther from nature. I’m in the middle of a 14-story building filled with college students, in the middle of Portland State University’s campus, in the middle of the concrete and tall buildings and mass transit systems that make up our city. I live on the most populated block in Portland; humans and human-made things surround me.
However, this shift back to the hustle-hustle-hustle pace of Downtown wasn’t much of a shock to me. I knew what living Downtown felt like, and I was excited about the chance to be so close to everything again, so connected to the pulse of this city, to have so few needs for my car on a regular basis. I was excited to be woken up in the early morning because of the garbage trucks, to hear the bells from the MAX as I fell asleep, to know any time there’s a fire or emergency because of the sirens. This kind of connectedness to the heart of things felt good to me. And still feels good.
I didn’t grow up in a traditionally outdoorsy family. It was my mom and me, in North Dakota, which is winter and well-below freezing most of the time. I didn’t like camping, or hiking, or ogle at and respect the landscape around me. It didn't seem like anything special to me; it just was. However, I did spend most of my childhood summers outdoors, at my grandparents’ house, and can still remember staying outside — running through my grandma’s huge flower garden, racing my cousins on our bikes up and down (and up and down, and up and down) the gravel driveway, lying on the grass after a water gun fight — until the sun set. Their Minnesota home was surrounded by fields that stretched for miles, crops sprouting out of the black earth, other homes and humans just specks in the distance. As the sky darkened, and my grandma or grandpa would call us in closer to the house, we’d look out over those fields and see this perfectly round, orange-yellow-red ball floating over the sky and down through the fields. And I remember being fascinated by how this sun thing worked, even as a kid who never had any interest in science other than making volcanoes out of baking soda and water.
“But where did it go?” I would think. ”You’re telling me that little ball lights up the whole sky? For EVERYONE on earth?”
Now, if I can time it right, I wake up with the sunrise. It’s getting harder as we move further into autumn and the sun comes up later while the time I have to be at work doesn’t, but even if I’m already awake, I make a conscious effort to move toward one of my two, five-foot by five-foot east-facing windows and pause. Take a deep breath. Look out. Sometimes I’ll stand with a cup of coffee, or with my hair halfway curled, or even when I’m already running a bit late for that early morning meeting. And from my 9th story apartment, I see the sun rise up over the hills. I can even see a corner of Mt. Hood defiantly peeking around the three tall buildings that block most of its view, with the sunshine behind it. The sky does all sorts of tricks within a five-to-ten-minute period of the sun stretching out over the landscape. Sometimes, it streaks yellows and oranges and pinks through strips of the remaining darkness. Sometimes, the whole sky turns bright pink. Sometimes, like on Wednesday morning, the sun rose through a thick layer of fog — fog so thick that I couldn’t see the bridges or traffic or river. But even when the clouds are heavy, hanging over the city without any glimmer of hope that Portland will see the actual sun that day, it still rises. It still shows up for the city, for us, for the world.
Watching the sun rise has been one of the most powerful experiences of my summer, one that has shaped my time in this new job, in this new apartment, and in some ways, in this new life. To begin each day being greeted by the sun — being grounded by this little orange-yellow-red ball that lights up the whole sky, for everyone in the world, no matter what — and to be reminded that I’m surrounded by nature, by earthiness, even though I live in an apartment within a residence hall in Downtown Portland. It reminds me that just by doing what it does, nature shows us that it loves us every single day. The sun rising, the rain falling, the plants growing, the leaves dropping, the clouds parting, even if just for a moment. And maybe — even if we’re planted in the middle of a bunch of concrete and human-made things — we can show it that we love it, too, by taking a moment to pause in reverence to whatever nature is around us.
