Heavenly Glory

Yesterday morning, in the cool dawn, I was out with my camera trying to immortalize a few new roses in the soft light of the sunrise.  I moved quickly throughout the garden, pausing here and there, eyes looking down, studying flowers and insects and cracks in the clay.  I pulled up a few prominent weeds, pondered when to move a particularly striking daylily, and checked the Japanese Beetle trap for prisoners.  I was lost, lost in the world at my feet, lost in the microsphere of green foliage and silken petals.

Suddenly, the bray of a donkey caused me to look up and opened my eyes to greater possibilities.  Over my neighbor's house, the sun of the new day was kissing the clouds as it rose.  Kansas, my friends, is a vast series of trials for a gardener, a punishing mix of drought and wind and harsh sunlight.  But we receive payment for our tribulations in the form of magnificent sunrises, golden rays of pure pleasure melting into pastel palettes of perfection.  It is these moments, stopped dead in mid-step by a glorious heaven, that I desperately try to freeze in memory and then carry into eternity.  Sheer beauty, waiting to be noticed by the puny gardener.

Oh, the rose photos didn't turn out so bad either.  Morning light brings out the best colors here, before the afternoon sun tires the blooms and washes them pale.  I've taken some better pictures of 'Blue Girl' with my Nikon than this mildly blurry picture with an iPhone shows, but this moment on the same morning couldn't be missed.  Whether on iPhone or Nikon, my best moments are captured in the morning, and so I rise with the sun, greeted by the sunshine, and joyful in each new day.