This morning began in darkness—true, unbroken darkness—the kind that makes you feel like the world is holding its breath. I was out early, chasing the possibility of Snowy Owls that have been gracing Maine and Massachusetts this season. I had only one camera with me—Nikon still has custody of the other—and of course I brought the wrong lens for what unfolded in the eastern sky.
But even with the long glass, even without the wide sweep of color that gently feathers the edges of morning—the soft pastels, the warm blush where fire meets the cool blues of night—I caught the heart of the sunrise. And that was enough. Because the sunrise isn’t about width or precision or equipment. It’s about transition. It’s about that breathless moment when darkness surrenders, willingly, gracefully, to a world awakening.
And as the sky opened, so did my thoughts.
Because life, much like a sunrise, is made of transitions we hardly notice. Most of the time they come quietly. The small changes slip into our days like a whisper—an ache, a shift in mood, a new curiosity, the arrival of a person who wasn’t there yesterday. We fold these subtle changes into the routine fabric of our lives without ceremony.
Then come the big transitions—the “sunrise” moments we celebrate: the wedding, the birth, the new job, the diploma in hand. And the “sunset” moments we meet with heavier hearts: the loss, the retirement, the divorce, the final goodbye. These are the markers that divide our lives into chapters. They create the “before” and “after” that become our emotional geography.
And still—we adapt.
We absorb.
We continue.
This is what I find most extraordinary about being human: our resilience, our capacity to evolve, our ability to keep rising even after life hands us a sunset we never wanted.
The sun sets.
The sun rises.
And somehow, so do we.
Each day we are given a new horizon, a new palette of color, a new chance to begin again—even if we don’t recognize it right away.
That, to me, is the quiet miracle of our existence.
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