Sounds of Sunrise — In Prose
Humility overwhelms me. My senses are awake with my place in Nature. I feel my spiritual world and all is content.
I am truly alive. My heart aches with a passion — a fierce desire to climb every mountain, to swim every river and blaze new trails. A fire has been lit inside of me — a consuming desire that comes with the sounds of sunrise on the river.
I hear what others are afraid to listen for.
My ears are nibbled on by a whippoorwill’s song… whippoorwills conversing in a cypress, bathed in morning’s first light — headed to sleep the day away after their all night concert.
Yellow shades of heaven spilling over grasses heavy with beetles — a brilliant glow on bumblebees in honeysuckle vines — the aroma I can taste.
Subtle winds tickle pine branches while one ripple from dragonfly toes skims the sensual stream — disrupting and accentuating the calmness of the cool water.
My shoulders bear the weight of sunshine and my feet the beautiful bruises of ancient sandstone.
Naked and vulnerable I stand… warm and wet and fearless. A primal voice tells me the secrets of time.
My body trembles as a humid breeze licks my belly; ageless spirits, disguised as the wind, run warm fingers thru my hair and whisper to me. Fish taste my legs in polite succession under the wet glass top of the river.
I stand in complete awe.
I squeeze red clay between my fingers — fragile clay that will be solid rock in the riverbed of tomorrow — for some new generation in a later, unfathomable age.
Crooked cedars slow dance over the water to the silent symphony of the Earth. Live Oak leaves wave to me from atop a red cliff and remind me that I am not alone.
I am a piece of this puzzle and I am molded from the same clay that I hold in my hand, from the same water the old turtles swim in, from the same seeds that grow the willows.
We are one creature’s soul and we inhabit many different bodies. We are the Earth’s blood.
My sun-kissed nose wrinkles as my face forms a smile. My body tingles with the magnificence of life. I can laugh with the rest of Creation, because I have been taught the sweet, simple secrets of life.
In order to complete any circle, the beginning must touch the end, the end becomes the beginning. Re-growth is the benefit of loss, the peaceful rain heals the violent drought — and each dark night gives birth to new sounds of sunrise.
Originally written in my teenage self’s journal in the 1990’s and published at Driftwood in 2011.
