Glorious Mornings
Reading Henry David Thoreau’s “Life Without Principle,” I was reminded of the author’s emphasis on observing sunrise and sunset, as well as other powerful elements of nature, in a way that places a proper perspective while mourning the loss of others’ lives or when engaged in personal spiritual introspection. Despite the varieties of disservice experienced, he suggests focusing upon elevating nature’s relationship with us to better ourselves. This contemporary commonplace world all too often appears to overwhelm everyone with its pervasive dispiriting news. Thoreau wrote the following: “Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.” By the end of the essay, Thoreau requested that everyone “congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning.” He concluded, “I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.”
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A yellow glow of sunshine seeps from beyond the horizon line, stretched as straight as a fastidiously ironed crease between the water and the sky. Daylight grows over this whole coastal landscape beside Lake Michigan, beginning to brighten even the deeper reaches of ravines between dune hills. Once, as a boy long ago when I visited Sicily with members of my family, I saw a similar sunrise opening over the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. A luminous slant of low morning light leaked through those few thin clouds remaining from an overnight rainstorm, igniting tall silhouetted steeples on a centuries-old Catholic cathedral. Lit from behind, the tip of each ancient spire burned like the wick of a prayer candle in a votive stand—a symbol signifying a parishioner’s request for guidance. Since then, grateful for nature, I associate every fiery daybreak with a sense of spiritual illumination, an offering of insight from divine light.
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Many of the finest landscape photographers follow a simple rule when scheduling time to capture images. With an emphasis on the importance of natural light in its many variations, they restrict their activities to scenes deemed the golden hours just before or after sunrise and sunset. Some regard these periods as the “magic” times. I have even heard a few state that they put their cameras aside the rest of the day. After all, George Eastman famously declared the preeminent power of luminosity in his advice for photographers: “Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.” Dawn at the Indiana Dunes tends specially to intensify vivid tints in winter when low and angled light passes through more of the atmosphere, extending shadows farther across the landscape. Consequently, rays of early sunshine also scatter widely, emphasizing a rich and diffused spectrum of colors above Lake Michigan that one might describe as magical.
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All morning, an early September sun peered through a growing gray overcast, then it disappeared at noon behind the arrival of black clouds accompanied by a far-off grumble of thunder. Although I photograph the storm’s approach, closing from the north, I notice the continuing shift of declining sunlight now completing its process. Seen from beneath an old oak, the darkened sky previews the net of nightfall that will follow sunset. With full foliage some months in the making, the tree limbs writhe in increasing gusts on a dune hill ridge above the shoreline. Shaken in the wind, a rustle of the branches sounds like a sigh, whether an expression of yearning or relief from an ache, I do not know. However, already a rehearsal of autumn is underway among some of its yellowing leaves. This landscape inspires and reshapes my imagination. When I stoop to look through my viewfinder with a zoom lens set to 200mm, the empty streak of beach below is reminiscent of an inviting airport runway reached after a wearying lengthy flight. A sprinkling of pebbles and shells stirs in a frothy swirl of surf, and the slight curve of coastline moves through my photo’s frame like the blade of a scythe.
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Overnight, although mostly unseen due to a moonless atmosphere, jagged clouds scraped their way across the black backdrop above Lake Michigan. In this morning’s light following the season’s first snowfall, a strong sun slowly rose amid the clarity of an almost cloudless day as if attempting to reclaim the landscape. In the windless sky, only a couple of plump puffs of white rested. The slick ivory shine of three-inch accumulation, a blank page of snow cover stored all night along the shoreline, dissipated quickly. Soon, small elliptical ponds of snowmelt spotted the foredunes, each oval pool showing a steady reflection of the new blue sky opening overhead. Details in photographs are sharper in frigid temperatures, and a peaceful comfort takes shape among spare nature’s purity as the air appears clearer in fair winter weather.
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Leaning from empty trees, a community of long shadows multiplies in this sprawl of early sunshine, which also brightens the curling white lace of waves breaking on the shore. Only a few wispy clouds have yet assembled, tapered like wind-stiffened pennants on the western horizon. Ring-billed gulls scratch at the beach sand and meander aimlessly along the turbulent surf like stranded castaways awaiting a rescue ship’s arrival. With my camera propped on a tripod tentatively positioned among the loose terrain of rolling foredunes alongside the shore, I capture this picturesque postcard moment. Already, early spring growth, patches of bent marram grass raked by an onshore breeze, adds a bit of green to the tan sand filling those low mounds I’ve focused upon, giving depth to this setting I have arranged within the photo’s frame. In this stilled image, halted in place by a quick shutter’s click, the sun and waves will always remain the same. More than a mix of descriptive words on a journal page, or a fleeting moment kept in mind and meant to be held forever in one’s unreliable memory, I desire to preserve these scenes in a print that will be mounted on a well-lit wall anyone may view at any time.
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Sometimes when the day awakens with a lengthening line of light along the lake at sunrise, and warm colors cover the shore, each detail beside the beach seems painted into place. Dunes, smoothed by onshore winds throughout the night, appear shaped by brush strokes. Tall leaves of yellow grass turning green bend whenever shifted by soft breezes drifting inland. Daylight’s tints dip into the coastal collar of trees fitted onto ridges of sand hills. Pale hulls of old sailboats brighten once more, their decks now slick with a sheen of sunshine. Although photographers normally dislike the harsh glare and sharp contrast of direct sunlight on a clear day, I find times in spring or summer when such conditions perfectly embody certain promising sentiments. Even sticks of wet driftwood resting at the edge of the surf exhibit a greater degree of texture when illuminated by a sparkling slant of intense light under suddenly rich hues of blue sky. Ring-billed gulls flutter their wings as they play in the breaking waves, while one bird splinters from the group, crosses the beach, and rises like a white kite launched into the air current. A faint series of webbed footsteps stretches across the damp sand like a scrawled signature written at the bottom of a finished artwork.
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Frank Lloyd Wright observed, “Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work.” This morning’s sunrise arrived with a flourish, unfolded a sky saturated by golden light like the bold color of Chardonnay wine, and the bluish-green lake water that had been black, overcast with a starless canopy, awakened from its stark spell of nighttime darkness. By the time I hike this beachfront stretch of trail, I find myself moving around some of those sand mounds deposited throughout the foredunes—shapes made during winters by winds displacing landscape, gifts lifted into place by an unseen hand. I see a sharp horizon line splits the image in front of me, and a repeated pattern outlines the shore’s edge, the surf’s spasms of breaking waves. Fluffy clusters of wind-driven clouds define the sky. Once again, this setting serves as inspiration. Working my way east along the coast, where the scenery is framed by a few leafless trees, the shadows of their slim limbs reach onto the tan sand of a surf-stained beach. A rocky breakwater of broken stones that appear like rough accents decorates the shorefront. Almost breathless from walking so far, I am reminded that breathless can also refer to emotional excitement, just as inspiration also means the act of drawing breath, the very essence of life.
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This vulnerable part of the park barred to traffic contains an elevated trail parched and filled with withering or wilted growth when under summer’s strong sun. But its path appears pleasant in today’s spring morning light. Beneath the influence of a vacillating breeze’s lazy sweep off the lake, particularly during this Easter weekend, anniversary of my initial visit to the Indiana Dunes, the setting is appealing. The scenery will likely seem even more charming to me in the future when remembered with a memory aided by my captured images, carefully composed photos intending to enhance its splendor. In addition to its religious significance and symbolism, Easter also has origins in natural mythology. The name perhaps derives linguistically from an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, Eostre (as well as the Germanic Ostara or Austro), who could be viewed as the deity of sunrise and an embodiment of the beginning to a new season at the vernal equinox. “Illumination” from the Easter Resurrection of the Son of God or from nature’s rising sun also suggests another connotation: enlightenment of the spirit and the mind, a sense of higher understanding suddenly attained. In fact, the longtime motto of the university where I have been for more than four decades, “In Thy light we see light,” is derived from Psalm 36:9 and speaks of such divine illumination.
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Each journey urges a further understanding of nature. Hiking a high trail through dune forest, my pants cuffs dampened by a residue of morning dew among the tangled underbrush, I find the way slow going, so I pause. Nearby, a smattering of musical chirps and lyrical chatter emanates from songbirds hidden within the fringes of wind-tossed tassels on a willow tree. As I listen to their hymns, an ash-gray scroll of chimney smoke drifts inland somewhere in the distance, scarring the far sky. Through a gap in the tree line, the lake exhibits a sliver of silver on the wide horizon, where I recognize a big merchant ship inching ahead toward the west, perhaps Chicago, weighted low in the water with its cargo of commodities. Whenever I walk these woods, I never fully forget this is a public park, preserved for everyone as an artificial refuge partitioned from surrounding industries and the everyday chaos of contemporary living. Nevertheless, the landscape encourages a temporary suspension to such substantiality of a physical reality to be replaced by a mystical spiritual core evident in those conscientiously composed photos I hope will pose an idyllic nature.
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Yesterday, I watched two teenagers steer their canoe down the Little Calumet River in a green tint of shade beneath overhanging limbs, mostly oak trees dried of dew by the sun under an hour after dawn. A slim fold of wake briefly followed them like a tiny reminder of the past, though soon to be smoothed and forgotten. I’d been hiking a trail on a bank alongside the river, looking to photograph morning light peeking through the late spring trees and illuminating the untroubled surface of the slowly flowing tributary. In midsummer, scrubby underbrush overruns those narrow sections of this route, and old oaks sometimes choked by drought exhibit leaves limp beneath extreme heat from unending sunshine. Since the initial influence of this morning’s sunrise, shifting shadows affecting ambient glow over the whole landscape had continually rearranged its appearance.
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When we waved to one another, both boys, dressed in short-sleeve shirts and jeans, paused rowing and raised their paddles out of the river, hoisting them over their shoulders as if in triumph but intended as a form of salute. However, the gentle stream of water, always a token of time’s progression, continued to pull them forward unhurriedly. Delighted, I similarly lifted my camera in return recognition. An easy breeze created a muttering among the leaves, speaking a language I’ve learned to appreciate and I imagined impatiently nudging me back to my pathway. As if half-hearted, a lone hawk gracefully floated overhead, seen intermittently in an opening among the canopy of treetops, long wings shifting position only a little with each pass in the path of onshore wind drifts from nearby Lake Michigan. Spiraling in an upper current as though illustratively imitating the rotation of the globe, he appeared almost passive, allowing the air to move him. Eventually, the canoe slid around a bend, slipping out of sight, the boys disappearing behind the thick trunk and broken branches of a hickory tree apparently toppled by a series of recent storm gusts.
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No longer painted ebony by a starless night sky, the glassy surface of the lake now flashes with the glare of dawn’s first flare. Darkness recedes with daylight the way an immense sense of the spiritual and a belief in God might bring relief after a period of personal grief. As sorrow fades away, an altered joy slowly and subtly reawakens following mourning. “In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. Although not a new idea, perhaps every sunrise represents an apt model for recovery and renewal; each day insists we once again seek our better selves.
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Today, the morning brightens under unfolding sunlight, dyeing distant and departing little clouds the color of petals on flowers in an Impressionist pastel print, and this grand landscape before me unwraps its innate gifts once more. I am left with a sense of envy for nature’s perfection or perseverance and a wish to receive benediction, to be blessed with bliss by the “influence of the earth,” as Thoreau phrased it. In the end, I like to believe in the lasting lesson that a source of solace is achieved by seeking the divine manifestation in nature, ascertaining the soothing of tense emotions inherent in new beginnings.