“Colors in the Morning”
🗓️ August 23, 2024
⏰ Read Time: 4 min
The cabin was asleep, and all those in it. The narrow stairwell and the photo-clad walls scraped against the heavy guitar case and my dry knuckles as I passed by. Ghostly floor board moans threatened with authority to wake the whole house. That pre-light of day sauntered in through wide windows, owning and owing with great purpose and greater effect. I made my way to them, fumbling at the adverse visibility of too much light after too much darkness. Too often I stopped to let the air settle back into silence from the thud of a misplaced foot or cavalier arm swing, praying it passed through unnoticed by the steady sleepers. Always, it did — and so I continued. The glass door to the porch grimaced at my approach, its tired hinges and cranky joints threatening to jeer. But the sunrise demands to be seen, unimpeded by panes of glass or tired eyelids. The wood frame of the door shuddered and bawled at my first efforts to open it. I paused, looked around, and resolved to make one final, selfish disruption, and with gumption, I yanked open the last stronghold of the house, walking with violent calm into the morning’s first moments.
It’s easy to say the sunrise was beautiful — most are. If it wasn’t beautiful, it wasn’t a sunrise, it was just “day break,” or “first light”, or “dawn.” But this one was a sunrise, pure and simple. Dead ahead was only sky, guarded on either side by two North Carolina mountain tops, cropped to cradle new light into new day. Biting air instinctively drew hands to mouth as I breathed to warm them, eyes ever fixed on the gentle explosion of newness and light. Then I grabbed my bag and set about the busyness of the day — after all I had people to see, and an album to record. Move aside sunrise, with your symphony of color and freshness — the music I make will last forever, not just a morning! So sayeth the proud.
This album, “Colors in the Morning,” soundtracks my steps from a life of defaults to one of intention. The theme was simply summarized in what I thought would be the final track: “Leaving Good,” a hyper-fixation on the idea of “leaving good to get what’s best.” But where do I leave to? What is best?
The song “Colors in the Morning” was written and recorded in two hours on a clear and cold morning in early January, two weeks after stepping away from my previous job. After two years of virtually no time off, I got stupendously and desperately sick, stuck in bed with a high fever for days. Between illness and major life upheaval, I felt wrung out and sour. I needed an end to these hopeful songs about getting to a better place, and it certainly wasn’t going to come from my current perspective. So I wrote and wrote, then wrote some more, filling up trash cans with scraps of almost-ideas, growing more frustrated with every torn page.
Then, in a moment of hopeless apathy, I looked out the frost bitten window and saw the sun coming up between two houses amongst the cookie cutter suburban sprawl. Like the two North Carolina mountain tops, the ticky tacky homes guarded the sun and cradled it into the world, right down the middle, and just for me. The sky laughed out its purples and oranges and yellows and pinks with a drunken kackle, and I soaked in it like a shallow pool. I let it wash me and melt me and bring me to a newness that made it all clear. “Come further up, come further in!” said the voice in my head, that occasionally eeks out a good idea. It was a quote from C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, the conclusion to his Narnia tale. All of the talking beasts and the people run towards the place they’ve always longed for, as the trees and the earth and the beauty slip into nothingness. Knowing full well that I was overdramatizing my circumstance, I, at least, could see the similarities.
These miraculous sunrises were bookending this journey for me. Though there isn’t always (or ever) the clearest picture of what waits on the other side of those sunrises, I know that it’s the “what’s best” I’m looking for. So I sang about it, about running to a sunrise, though the trees and the earth and the beauty in my circumstance seemed to slip more into “nothingness.” And you know what? All of those colors eventually fade into another day, another day to live; another day to try again.
