Sunrise Alone On Mountain

You were here before the light. That was the whole point.

The climb in the dark is different from the climb in daylight. You navigate by the path, by the rock underfoot, by the pale suggestion of sky above the ridgeline. Your world contracts to the circles of your headlight and the feel of the ground through your boots. Everything else is dark and cold and absolute.

But you are moving toward something. That is the difference between darkness with a purpose and darkness without one. Every step upward is a step toward the event. The event that will happen whether you are here or not, but that you wanted to witness because there is a difference between knowing a thing and seeing it.

The rock flattens. You are near the top. The wind here is unimpeded, coming off the range, cold enough to require everything you brought. You pull your jacket tighter and find a rock to sit against, something to break the wind from behind. The sky ahead of you, to the east, is beginning.

It is not yet light. It is less dark. A gradation, almost imperceptible at first, from black to a deep blue-black to a deep blue. The horizon, which you could not see ten minutes ago, resolves. The line between earth and sky appears. Then the darkness above it becomes blue and the blue becomes, hold on, a pale gold at the very rim.

The cold is entirely forgotten for a moment. Because the world is doing something.

The gold band at the horizon thickens. It rises slightly. It takes on depth, layers of colour, gold becoming amber becoming a deep red-orange at the centre where the sun is. All of this is happening in silence. The light change is complete silence. Wind, yes. The occasional sound of stone. But the light change itself happens without a sound.

Then the edge of the sun. A sliver. Then a semicircle. Then, with improbable speed, the full disc, rising clear of the horizon, sending the first direct light across the mountains in beams that pick out the peaks in gold and leave the valleys below in blue shadow. Two worlds. Sun and shadow. And you are standing in the sun.

The warmth arrives. Delayed slightly, a few seconds after the sight, the warmth of the first rays reaching you from ninety-three million miles away, arriving after eight minutes of travel, finding your face on this cold ridge.

You are very small up here. The range extends in every direction. The valleys below are tiny. The roads and buildings, if any are visible, are the scale of a model. The world is vast and you are a person on a rock near the top of one mountain among hundreds.

And yet you were here for the beginning of this day. You attended it. Most of the world is still asleep. This light is being seen by the birds and the animals and you and possibly no other person within twenty kilometres.

The day belongs to you in a way that days earned by effort always do.

Watch the world warm. You earned this warmth.

...