Morning Has Broken Like the First Morning

Imagine that. Imagine the first morning.

It is 2:24am. It’s been awhile, several years since I found myself wide awake and dawn hours away. I went outside to see what I could see of the sky. Took some maneuvering between streetlights, across-the-street neighbors’ safety lights, and other neighbors’ inside-the-house lights all thrusting their respective glares, but, standing in my driveway within the shadow (yes even in dark, shadows) of my house and my easterly neighbor’s house, making binoculars of my two hands wrapped around the perimeters of my eyes I saw ursa minor over the backyard, and turning around I think I saw castor and pollux bright behind me over the street at my back. I took a picture of ursa minor. Three stars in their line showed up on the picture, that was the range my phonecamera could capture. But you know what else, was it dust in the air local to my body, ground level air interfering with my photograph, or, was it atmospheric dust a few to dozens of feet above me, or was it billions of stars littering, making impossibly ununiform the rest of the picture my phonecamera captured?

I don’t know. I tried to upload the photograph from my phone to my laptop. The software will not let me. Too dark for my laptop’s eyes. I leave it to you to try this yourself. Step outside, stare at the stars you can see, take a picture, look at the picture, what else do you see? Look up at the sky again, what more do you see now?

This was the night to do this, perhaps that’s why I woke up. It is the first not full of clouds day and night combination in quite awhile. And, at 2:24am the wind had gone away too. It is now 3:44 (I spent some time looking through my National Geographic Pocket Guide: Night Sky, and some time watching/listening to Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam youtube videos. I am fan of his, and I believe I have all but one of his Cat Stevens’ albums from the 1970s. It is 2024 and Yusuf is still singing with a voice that is almost identical to 1974.)

Morning has broken like the first morning, blackbird has spoken like the first bird. Praise for the singing, praise for the morning. Praise for them springing, fresh from the Word.

You can find the rest of the lyrics to this song of his online. It’s from his album, Teaser and the Firecat. I read that this song’s origins are in a Scottish hymn.

How has your March been so far? The other day I was walking, bending against headwinds and suddenly it occurred to me–March!! March winds storming in like a lion and lilting out like a lamb. When was the last time that elementary school lesson spoke to me? And how has it taken so long for me to recognize the factuality of that little phrase “in like a lion out like a lamb”? So much of our learning is grounded in life lived. We need only open up and understand.

A week ago I stood at the ocean, buffeted and pelleted, but awed.

This morning I stood in still air, tossed by nothing, and yes, awed.

The following is information I found on Seasky.org

Ursa Minor contains only 3 stars brighter than magnitude 4. Polaris, the North Star, is the brightest with a visual magnitude of 1.98. It is a multiple star system that contains at least three individual stars. It is located about 434 light years from Earth. The second brightest star in the constellation is Kocab with a magnitude of 2.08. It is an orange giant star that lies about 130 light years from our solar system. Pherkad is the third brightest star with a magnitude of 3.05. It is a yellow-white giant star located approximately 487 light years away.

The constellation Ursa Minor, the little bear, is visible in the northern hemisphere all year long. It is a circumpolar constellation, which means it is visible all night as it rotates around the north celestial pole. It is a small constellation covering an area of 256 square degrees. It ranks 56th in size among the 88 constellations in the night sky. It is famous for a group of stars known as the Little Dipper and for Polaris, the North Star, which is located at the tip of the dipper’s handle. Polaris is called the North Star because it is the closest star to the north celestial pole. This means that as the Earth rotates, Polaris appears to remain stationary in the sky while all of the other stars rotate around it. Because the Earth wobbles slightly as it rotates on its axis, Polaris will not always be the North Star. In about 14,000 years the north celestial pole will point away from Polaris and toward Vega. This process is known as procession. Polaris is an important star for navigation, allowing mariners to easily identify their latitude

Imagine that.

4:34am. Sun will rise at 6:59am.

Like the first morning.