I met the morning sun today on Brook Hollows’ veranda as I try to do every morning. Unlike yesterdays mostly static layer of clouds which didn’t really allow the sun to be present in the sky, today the sun and wind-driven clouds seemed to be dueling. Small gaps in the clouds as they tore across the sky would let the sun power through, and then disappear leaving behind only a glowing purple/orange/yellow concentration to mark the sun’s true location.

I took a photo from the veranda, like I often do, I’m sure my facebook friends are getting tired of the view across the cul-de-sac but I find that few minutes each morning often set the tone for the day for me. I posted the photo to facebook and titled it “Morning Promise.” I don’t think a lot of the title for these photos, or for my paintings for that matter, the words usually just pop in my head.

This is the photo. The title has me thinking about it still. Looking at the definition of promise, it seems implicit that two parties are involved in a promise. A promise is an assurance that a particular thing will happen. So why did my instinct see this rip in the wind-driven clouds as a promise? Was I making a promise? Was the sun? or the Son?

Looking closer at the sky, the dark clouds are dueling with the sun, masking, revealing, filtering… The sunrise has long been a symbol of renewal, renewal from the dark of night, a force that chases away the unseen, and we know that the sun is what powers plants upwards, flowers to bloom, and maybe even my veranda tomatoes to ripen! Like most any good thing, the sun can also have another side, becoming too much, too bright, too hot, burning the very plants it helped rise from the soil. So where is this going?

I’m thinking that the clouds aren’t the bad guy here, but are, like so many things, an opposite kind of partner. Its true that clouds often bring rain, so the sun can do its work, that clouds, in partially obscuring the sun, also reveal the sun and maybe even more so than if the sun just rose in the blue sky. The darkness makes it possible to know the light and in filtering and masking, shows us things about the sun that we had never noticed before, like the oranges, yellows, and gray/blue/purples that came and went during the morning duel.

So maybe the promise of this mornings sun was the revelation of a complexity that is sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes opposes our immediate wants (for me a blue sky sunrise) but in opposing us, shows us something more.

Maybe the intermittent darkness is a good thing, it shows us things we hadn’t seen before. Sometimes those things are positive, sometimes disappointing. So I think the promise was to reveal things if we take up the challenge.

We all face clouds in our lives, mine sometimes are big nasty thunderheads, and I’m learning that the sunshine i had could have been more complex, more rewarding, if i had been willing to see it through my clouds.

Anyway, please be good to each other today, some people in your day will be clouds, at first unwanted, but then revealing things about the sun to us. I think we need them both, the sun isn’t always the good guy, and the clouds aren’t always the bad guy. Its complicated, but important.

Stay safe, be nice.