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Sunrise – Rosslyn Redux

Rosslyn Redux

Tag: Sunrise

  • Smoky Sunrise Over Lake Champlain

    Smoky Sunrise Over Lake Champlain

    This morning came early. Really, *REALLY* early. Yesterday was one of those days when damn near everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It was so hyperbolic that if it were a movie, nobody would have believed it. So by 5:38 o’clock this morning I’d been awake for a couple of hours. And I was rewarded with this disturbing (because of the Canadian wildfires) but spectacular smoky sunrise over Lake Champlain.

    Smoky Sunrise Over Lake Champlain (Photo: Geo Davis)
    Smoky Sunrise Over Lake Champlain (Photo: Geo Davis)

    That photograph above captures most of the drama, but the burning orb ascending from Vermont’s Green Mountains was actually an even crazier color of fluorescent orangey pink. Surreal. And big. And super bright. The entire Champlain Valley was thick with mustard grey-brown haze. Yes, these smoky skies are courtesy of the hundreds of Canadian wildfires burning out of control. And, no, the uncanny twist of fate — we fled Santa Fe a year ago to escape the sooty pollution of out-of-control wildfires only yo be inunda with the same now in Essex, New York — isn’t lost on us. Crazy times.

    And yet, the upside of our Adirondack Coast choking on alarming high particulate counts for our typically pristine air is the sunrises and sunsets. They’ve been otherworldly.

    Smoky Sunrise Over Lake Champlain (Photo: Geo Davis)
    Smoky Sunrise Over Lake Champlain (Photo: Geo Davis)

    As this morning’s smoky sunrise yielded to the smoke, our environs looked as if a huge storm were overtaking us. But no, in the second photo above, you can see no storm. Just the long lingering aftermath of burning forests.

    If you’re moving picture inclined, you may enjoy the musical reel I shared on Instagram earlier today.

    https://www.instagram.com/reel/CuXeiXRAPpl/

    Today quickly shifted into unseasonably humid and scorching conditions which was challenging for everyone working on the icehouse rehab, but the smoke lifted, and this afternoon’s air quality is considerably improved.

  • Meditative March

    Meditative March

    Mornings offer me moments of introspection, mostly optimistic meditations catalyzed by the dawning of a new day. A fresh start. So much pent up potential swelling. And like morning, springtime fills me with enthusiasm for what is possible. A seasonal morning. And so I’m finding myself lately absorbed in this liminal zone of daily and seasonal reawakening. Yes, it’s been a meditative March…

    Meditative March (Photo: Geo Davis)
    Meditative March (Photo: Geo Davis)

    This morning’s March 16, 2023 sunrise over Lake Champlain — with new snow still covering Rosslyn’s lawns and fields but the lake lapping languidly, never having frozen this winter — conjures exuberance and anticipation, both overlaid with dark silhouettes. There is heightened contrast and a lingering darkness. There is also explosive blooming of color and light. Our winter world is reawakening.

    With the official start of spring only days away, even the calendar acknowledges this liminal moment. Meditative March is not subtle in its instruction. Pause. Consider. Mindful morning meditations happen unbidden, but wonder wants throughout the day. Allow for it. Tea and rumination. A muddy meander. A hunt for green shoots parting the leaf rot, swollen buds bursting along stems and limbs, the Doppler effect of Canada geese migrating high overhead, locating last season’s allium stems hung for drying in a carriage barn horse stall,…

    Meditative March (Photo: Geo Davis)
    Meditative March (Photo: Geo Davis)

    There’s something about the light in that snapshot above — weak, filtered through cobwebs, illuminating edges, painterly, flirting with chiaroscuro — that mesmerizes me. It conveys that meditative March moodiness, as if the carriage barn, as if Rosslyn itself were ruminating, introspective, contemplative, wondering and wandering inward… Can a home brood?!?!

    I invite you to enjoy Mischa Maisky’s cello performance of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals: The Swan coupled with the same photo below.

    https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cp2Y8r5AE2_/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
  • Daybreak

    Daybreak

    Daybreak Haiku: Lake Champlain sunrise through wavy-glass parlor window (Source: Geo Davis)
    Daybreak: Lake Champlain sunrise through “wavy glass” in late August, summertime slipping through the hourglass. (Source: Geo Davis)

    Since my earliest Rosslyn intrigue, wondering if the house and property might one day become a home for us, daybreak was my fixation. Perhaps it was just my lifelong affinity for early morning. As an early riser dawn has long been my favorite time of time, a world of possibility… Perhaps it was just curiosity what Rosslyn would feel like, look like, wandering room-to-room early in the morning. Although the front hallway was still in decidedly unfinished condition when we first visited, I imagined the walls painted a pale yellow, transporting the sunrise inside, warming the house with the brightening day.

    Daybreak Discernment

    This summer has been marked with singularly spectacular sunrises (and sunsets), and I’ve written much and often about these liminal states. This morning, however, catching sight of daybreak through wavy glass in the front parlor, I was struck concurrently with two thoughts.

    The wave-rippled surface of Lake Champlain was refracting dawn’s beacon, distorting the beam of fiery orange sunlight into a row of burning “puddles” that wavy glass in the parlor windows was further altering into a dancing mirage. Searing reality transformed into a optical illusion. I was reminded that Rosslyn has often altered my way of seeing and experiencing.

    These summer days are filtering faster and faster from anticipation to happening to memories. Just as the fleeting illusion of fiery puddles or bonfires or — pushing possibility to it’s breaking point — fiery cairns guided my eye to the rising sun, wobbling up out of Vermont’s Green Mountains like some hallucination, almost as quickly mellowing to a buttery yellow before vanishing altogether in the cloud bank above, just as quickly this summer is reaching its conclusion.

    And these bittersweet realizations, as if coupling and procreating, gave birth to a daybreak haiku.

    Daybreak Haiku

    Daybreak inside out,
    sunrise sublime, august hours
    tick-tock-ing away.
    — @rosslynredux

    A window view early on a Sunday morning. A blazing daybreak. Wavy lake and wavy glass. Near, familiar silhouettes framing a veritable mirage. Dawn within. Dawn without.

  • Imagining Rosslyn Boathouse, Spring 2006

    Rosslyn boathouse at sunrise (Digital doodle: virtualDavis)
    Rosslyn boathouse at sunrise (Digital doodle: virtualDavis)

    “Coffee? You don’t even drink coffee,” Susan said.

    “I know. I know it doesn’t make any sense. But I’m walking through Rosslyn early in the morning with a steaming cup of coffee…”

    I hadn’t drunk coffee since college, and I’d obviously never wandered around Rosslyn at the crack of dawn either. But I kept having this vision.

    “It’s just barely sunrise. You’re still sleeping. I’m up, drifting from room-to-room, slowly, haltingly, studying the way the sunlight illuminates each room. And those green walls in the parlor? They vibrate in the morning light, like new maple leaves in the springtime.”

    I described the shaft of sunlight stretching across the workshop floor. I described the calm, the quiet except for an occasional creaky floorboard. I described Tasha, our Labrador Retriever, padding along with me, anxious for breakfast.

    “Tasha sighs and lies down each time I stop. And I stop a lot… to watch the morning unfolding, to watch the sunlight shimmering on the rippled lake, to watch the boathouse clapboards glowing yellow orange for a few minutes as the sun rises above the Green Mountains.”

    “I was imagining the boathouse too,” Susan said. “Not like today, but like it was ours, like we lived at Rosslyn. I was thinking, the boathouse’s just begging for a hammock. Don’t you think? A big, two-person hammock in the open-air part, under the roof. Can you imagine lying in a hammock in the evening, listening to the waves?” Susan paused, lost in the idea. “And think of the dinner parties,” she continued. “A table set for four. White linens and candles and sheer curtains billowing in the breeze…”

  • Winter Solstice: Longer Days Ahead

    Winter Solstice: Longer Days Ahead

    Griffin Considers Winter Solstice: December 22, 2013 (Photo: Geo Davis)
    Griffin Considers Winter Solstice: December 22, 2013 (Photo: Geo Davis)

    Welcome to day one of the Adirondack Coast‘s coldest season. Today is the winter solstice, the first official day of winter, and — more importantly for the likes of my mother and others who favor longer days and shorter nights — the threshold between the briefest day and the most prolonged night and imperceptibly-but-steadily lengthening daylight. If you live in the North Country it seems peculiar that winter should only have just begun given several weeks of wintery weather. Seasonality, in these parts, might suggest a slightly earlier autumn-to-winter transition, closer to Thanksgiving than to Christmas.

    But the choice is ours to remark and not to make, so we soberly observe this hibernal milestone with tempered optimism that sunnier days await us on the other side. And, for the astronomically exuberant, it’s time to celebrate. Cheers!

    If you’re longing for more sunlight, Wednesday is a day to celebrate: Dec. 21 is the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year — and first day of astronomical winter — in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s a sign that longer, brighter days are upon us. (Source: Justin Grieser, “First day of winter: Shortest day, longest night on December 21 solstice“, The Washington Post, December 21, 2022)

    But, as with most tidy transitions, this threshold isn’t actually so tidy. Winter solstice may mark the shortest day and the longest night of the year, but the sunrise and sunset equation is slightly more muddled.

    The bottom line: mornings will get a bit darker until early January, but we’ve already gained a few minutes of evening light. On balance, daylight will start to increase after Dec. 21, even as winter’s coldest days still lie ahead. (Source: Justin Grieser, “First day of winter: Shortest day, longest night on December 21 solstice“, The Washington Post, December 21, 2022)

    So let’s focus on the lengthening days. And, if those increasingly cold days ahead bring snow, then let’s focus on that as well. After all, winter — proper, snowy winter — is one of our four favorite seasons of the year at Rosslyn! It’s a time for dog adventures, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, alpine and telemark skiing, bird feeders flush with avian wildlife, and that unique flavor or crystal clarity that only a subzero morning can catalyze.

    Winter Solstice & Onward: December 21, 2022 (Image: Dark Sky)
    Winter Solstice & Onward: December 21, 2022 (Image: Dark Sky)

    And speaking of colder days ahead, this screenshot from Dark Sky appears to corroborate the generalization, albeit with a curious exception on Friday. Winter is here, and it looks probably that we’ll be able to enjoy a white Christmas (unless Friday’s warm weather melts the existing snow and delivers rain instead.)

    In closing, note that the handsome Labrador retriever atop this post is not Carley, our current dog, but Griffin, a prior pal-o-mine. We lost him just over two years ago, and the ache hasn’t subsided. Maybe with longer, colder days ahead…

  • A Lake Is Born

    A Lake Is Born

    A Lake Is Born (Source: Geo Davis)
    A Lake Is Born (Source: Geo Davis)

    No night, I’m thinking
    (willing, really), lasts
    forever, endless.
    But my confidence
    flutters then falters.
    What if I’m wrong?

    Just then, before dawn,
    day breaks early and
    undreams the darkness,
    banishes black that
    ripens to eggplant,
    fades to indigo.

    A solitary
    sunbeam’s hatchet honed
    cleaves wide somber dome,
    spills veins of amber,
    honey smeared scarlet
    over-ripened, bursts.

    A vast aquarelle
    unleveed shimmers,
    a lake is born and
    mountain range cutouts,
    mirrored but mottled
    on breeze dimpled plain. 

     

  • Morning Meander

    Morning Meander, June 12, 2018 (Source: Geo Davis)
    Morning Meander, June 12, 2018 (Source: Geo Davis)

    My best days at Rosslyn start with a mellow morning meander to the waterfront to watch the sun rise up out of the Green Mountains. Or to the vegetable gardens and orchard to pick fresh fruit while sipping my tea. Or around the property inspecting flower beds and deadheading peonies or whatever else has bloomed and withered.

    And by my side, my Labrador Retriever. In our early days at Rosslyn, our dog (and my early-morning companion) was Tasha, an almost snow white Lab who passed away as we neared the final significant phase of Rosslyn’s rehabilitation. Tasha was buried beneath a maple tree that she frequented for, well, shall we say, her morning and evening rituals.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCbpdJJmItc?rel=0&w=500 ]

    Griffin joined our family after Tasha, and he turned ten years old this spring. It hardly seems possible. How did a puppy who so recently chewed up the trim (just as soon as the finish carpenters and painters finished) rocket into the early weeks of his second decade?!?!

    Griffin was with me during my morning meander this past Tuesday, June 12. He too loves early morning but for different reasons than I, so my sunrise saunter was brief enough for me to get back inside and make his breakfast before he fainted from starvation…

  • When Your B-Roll Becomes Your A-Roll

    Lake Champlain sunrise. Still mostly dark. Then an explosion of fiery day over the silhouetted Green Mountains in Vermont, over the slightly refracting waters of the lake…

    When Your A-Roll Becomes Your B-Roll (Source: Geo Davis)
    When Your A-Roll Becomes Your B-Roll (Source: Geo Davis)

    It’s mornings like this when your B-roll becomes your A-roll! It’s mornings like this that I pinch myself. Gently. But enough to startle myself into reassessing my day’s priorities.

    Today I caught myself just in time to juggle priorities. Here’s what convinced me to recalibrate the agenda.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak6ECe95YRk?rel=0&w=500 ]

    Ah, yes, Adirondack summer. I hope the rest of the day is as spectacular as the beginning!