Election Day sunrise

We got to taking Saturday about a sunrise wedding some years ago that several had attended --- intended the bride said to link the beginning of new life together to the beginning of a new day. The marriage, as it turned out, produced several children, considerable rancor and a divorce. But it was a nice thought.

I'm sure some sort of comparison could be worked out here to our election cycles --- hope, marriage, rancor and divorce --- but that would be stating the obvious. I've been through too many of these cycles to take them too seriously.

The sunrise reminds me of continuity rather than beginnings --- and the complete and total expendability of the human species. With us, or without us, election day or the day after, the sun also will rise and that will be just as remarkable as it was the day before even if we're not there to comment on it (or don't feel like commenting). I find both continuity and expendability hopeful.

First this morning the clouds above the bluff treeline east of the marsh caught fire --- modestly so (some sunrises are more colorful than others). It's a good time of year to observe the spectacle through autumn shapes stripped of color as life retreats underground for a season leaving shapely but skeletal reminders of what was and what will be again.

This certainly has been an election season of shape but little substance. Hope is there, but it's gone underground for a season while politicians with no real idea of what to do in troublesome times try to convince us we should vote for them because they're not those other guys.

As the great golden orb of the sun begins to appear through the trees on the bluff, the sky brightens. This is a brief window of opportunity to see the shape of the sun, although it doesn't photograph well with a simple camera. Soon, the light will become blinding.

I like to spend an hour most Monday mornings visiting and drinking coffee with the artists who gather in the parish hall for a few hours to work together on individual projects. They're a bright, creative and interesting group; many, lamentably, Republicans. We were pretty much in agreement this week, however, that it is a season when nearly everyone who votes will be voting against something or someone rather than for. I don't remember an election quite so apparently hopeless on both sides of the partisan fence.

This is a prairie plant gone fully to seed and frosted by the cold, beautiful in its own right and also for the promise those seeds --- soon to be scattered by winter winds --- carries. I wonder if hope will re-emerge after all the electioneering is said and done.

Finally, the sun is up and its officially a new day. The red-winged blackbirds in the treetop don't care who wins today. I do. But tomorrow's sunrise will be just as beautiful as today's whatever the outcome. And hope will have another chance, if not on Nov. 3 perhaps in two years.