First Sunrise 2018

This is the fourth in my series of posts on the first sunrise of the year, or Hatsuhi no De in Japanese (初日の出).  I've been making a habit of writing these things, and today seemed a worthy day to attempt to see the first rays of the sun and follow the tradition of a people not my own.

Before bed, I set an alarm close to sunrise, but left a window open.  The twilight won the alarm contest, awaking me three minutes before the iPhone.  With calm winds and warm-for-sunrise-in-winter temperatures, I dressed relatively lightly -- just a wool shirt and jeans.  This proved to be quite enough for today.  Like, I wasn't cold the entire time, which is a pleasant change.

I kind of cheated this year, letting the twilight wake me. That was late enough to miss the early action; by the time I got outside, all of the birds were already awake, if still organizing their rounds with various chirps, cries, and caws.

The layers of high clouds spanning the sky had an pinkish hue when I woke up, making this a pretty late start -- but for once I had spent the night out partying, so it's not like I was going to push it today.

I climbed atop the dew-soaked rooftop, it still bearing with a year of dust, and then sprinkled with a light layer of ash.

Last year I mentioned that Ventura's landmark Two Trees were dying.  We had enough rain to save the west one for a while.  But the east tree, ever the weaker of the two, was reduced to bare branches.  Back in April, to preserve the landmark, some locals planted another small Tasmanian blue gum eucalyptus to replace the ailing tree into the future.  And then, in October, the east tree broke in half at the top of the trunk.  And then, on December fourth, the fires came.

It swept from Thomas Aquinas college in Santa Paula down to Ventura in hours, and obliterated the homes of a few of my friends in less than an hour.  Looking at the blackened hillside, I can still recall the same hills wreathed with flames a month ago, a vivid orange line lighting a city that was otherwise low on electricity.  The smoke blocking all but the sky's lights save a ruddy full moon and the piercing blue of Sirius.

Fed by a month of repeated Santa Ana wind events, the Thomas Fire still rages on today.  They say the fire is 93% contained now, which means it's still smoldering up in the hills.  I'm not sure if that's the source of the lingering smoke at night, or if it's just the smell of the layer of ash still coating the ground.

The new Two Trees are alive for now, although the former east tree, the last survivor of the 1890s, is charred to a crisp.  And we've had a rainless season so far, a December of dry winds.  With no rain in sight, how will the other trees ever recover?

In the old days, the Japanese name for the month of October is Kannazuki (神無月), literally the Godless Month.  The legend is that all of the gods of Japan would leave to attend court at a particular shrine, leaving the rest of the country without its gods.  And as I look into my own yard, a Japanese maple has just finished turning green leaves to red, as it should have done in October.  So why not call it the Godless month, where the powers that used to protect us seemed to have abandoned us?

And that's how 2017 went, one insult after another, until finally the fire came to consume everything.  It's hard to forget about when your view is of one of a blackened hillside, and the smoke still penetrates my nose, with a scent somewhere between manure and that of a cigar.

As the light to the east grows lighter, the most of the wispy clouds begin to fade from view.  My attention has been stuck on the hills for so long, I've forgotten to look around.  The west is lightening up, and the south, well, it was too hazy to see the ocean.

The goldfinches wer twittering up a storm in the abutalon flowers, and the hummingbirds were already feeding from the flowers.  The red-throated hummer tolerates finches amongst the leaves of their favorite flower, but another hummingbird stealing their nectar is not cool.  But he's safe for now.

Meanwhile, a crow took a perch atop a telephone pole behind me.  He gave me the lookover.  The look like, "I am totally not looking at you, don't mind me, but what exactly are you standing up there for anyway?"

Because of the damp and ashy roof, and because the air is calm, I'd remained standing the whole time.  My feet are still a little sore from last night.  I was invited to a rather fancy party last night, and I went in full tuxedo with tails, top hat, and all.  Bowties are cool.  My date had done her best to wear a dress from the era of Hollywood glamour, and we had a great time.

Me, not with my date

But those shoes did hurt after a while, the price of fashion.  I bought them at a costume shop called Victorian Vogue, along with the most of the outfit.  Don't bother looking them up, because they had finally closed the store the day before, after thirty years, due to slowing business.  Yet another loss.

But a costume sale did get me into the party, so I could pass for someone of high enough class to get in.  It was great to actually be at a party, because so many Christmas parties were cancelled as a result the fires.  We do need to celebrate and have good cheer in the face of all of this, after all.

And yet, at the party, there was still a sense of loss through the revelers.  "Were you evacuated?"  "How close did the flames get?"  "Is everyone OK?"  Those were the questions of the night.  Even in our merriment, tragedy forces its way into our lives in those moments we leave the dance floor.

After a time, I heard the crow behind me call out, and a second crow just dropped out of the sky to join him.  Were they my old friends Phobos and Deimos?  Or another pair, intrigued by an oddly-behaving human, up here alone on a winter's day?

And what does it mean that only here, in solitude, do I really celebrate the new year?  I can't really share this with most Americans.  Most of them wouldn't understand or be willing to wake up now, having stayed out late partying -- or more likely late watching other people partying on TV.

There are no lines to enter the shrines and churches in the U.S., though I know that New Year's was once a church holiday, one of the four main festivals of the short Christmas season.  It's hard to explain why, but the rituals are important.  They give me a chance to step back, escape from my cell phone, and live life in the moment.

Which reminded me that I should really snap some pictures, so I pulled out my cell phone.  More and more clouds are once again revealed as the yellow glow increases to the East, and the sun begins to rise over the Santa Monica Mountains.

The glow suffused the star pine in the distance, which looked a good deal like Moses's burning bush.  A halo of the purest yellow light surrounded the eastern sky, and then, just suddenly, a ray of true sunlight peeked through.

The corona of light around the sun all seemed to blend together into a golden glow.  With so many clouds, it was hard to see the shape of the sun, but when I closed my eye, I could see the half-disc of the sun perfectly well as an after-image.

All of the other clouds were back, in brilliant white.  Woven cirrostratus to the north east. Rows upon rows of straight line cirrus to the southwest, looking as thin as fishbones.  And was that a dragonfly-shaped cloud I spied?  Well, close enough, I guess.

I guess for every fire that destroys, there's another that reveals beauty.  Even if I have to look a little harder for the beauty.  Maybe that's all I'm going to get out of this year's sunrise.  Maybe I'm just here to grieve, for the fires, for all of the illnesses amongst all of the family, for the death of my dog Abby (her son Shasta stayed asleep this morning), the death of an aunt, and for just a string of rotten luck.  No one I know thought 2017 treated them kindly, and most have their own tragedies to bear.

It worries me that the one portentous thing I said in last year's edition was the thing to come true: That destruction has come to visit us, without the balancing warmth of creation.  And that is why I pray for this year:  I pray for a fire that brings beauty and renewal, one that warms our hearts, and creates more than it destroys.  And, most of all, I pray for rain.  Please.

First Sunrise 2017

This is the third in my series of posts on the first sunrise of the year, or Hatsuhi no De in Japanese (初日の出).  Once again, I set off on a very easy quest to see the very first sunlight of the new year.

Just like my last post on this topic, I was awoken just by dulcet tones of the "Marimba" tone on my iPhone, in the morning twilight.  The same phone as last time, I was recently informed that it is now the oldest cell phone on my company's plan.  It's been quite a while since my last hatsuhi outing.  But it still feels very mottainai to replace a phone that does everything I need, so I'm carrying it into the new year.

Today, my dog Shasta decided to join me in heading out into the morning twilight.  The weather was calm and the mid-40s -- not so hot, but not so cold as last year where the near-freezing winds kept me swaddled in my bed.

Being a meteorologist and a very amateur astronomer, naturally the first thing I did as I got outside was to look up.  I was a met with a blank sheet of grayish blues, blending off into a greenish hue in the far east.

The only thing in the sky was Jupiter, high to the south, its great light piercing the twilight.  It's the kind of sight that most people will easily miss, but if you know to look along the ecliptic plane, it's obvious.  And Jupiter was quite the welcome sight, as I hadn't seen the shepherd planet for months now.

Lately, the dominance of Venus as the evening star has been unnerving me just a little, playing along with the half moon that graced our skies on Election Day.  A moon cut in twain, one-half light and one-half dark.  I tell myself that these lights in the sky don't have real meaning, but they still have the meaning our subconscious gives them anyway.

But my attention was drawn earthward by the sharp click of a green-breasted hummingbird perched on our abutilon.  He's half asleep still, but he keeps tweeting me his warning: "Hey, this is my nectar tree buddy, so watch your step."

Shasta has since finished the first round of the yard, and came back to ask me what we're going to do today.  Perhaps I was inspired by the Thin Man movie I watched last night, or just the fact that a wire fox terrier is game for anything.  "C'mere Shasta, let's go up on the roof."

I hoisted Shasta up onto the roof, shingles still damp from yesterday's rain, and then hoisted myself.  Shasta took a quick appraisal of everything that was around, smelling every object he could find from the fireplace to the satellite dish.

Is this a sewer vent?  Oh wow, this is super interesting.

Well, sometimes a wire fox terrier can be a little too game.  Or gamey.  So I called him up to the top, and held him on my lap as we waited for the sunrise on the roof's apex.

The sky brightened enough to hide Jupiter, but we since had picked up a few travelers: loud and annoying seagulls, announcing the day's business as they flew inland on their routes.  And a jet high above us cast just a glimmer of a reflection of the sun's rays, but with nary a wisp of cloud behind it.

A look across the treetops to the south revealed a lovely green land, even more verdant than looking at it from below.  Maybe too green for this particular land, but we built it, we earned it, and with any luck the rain will keep coming to sustain us.

On reflection of what we had made of our land here, something just switched inside me.  A moment of deep grief for all of the things we've lost last year.  For the wounds we've taken.  A worry that this, all of this, could fall to ruin.  Not a sense of mono no aware, but something deeper and crueler.  In order to create, one must destroy, but destruction without creation is another thing entirely.

Off to the north, Ventura's iconic Two Trees are fast becoming One Trees as the eastern eucalyptus of the pair slowly succumbs to damage from the long drought.  Below it and much nearer to me sits a giant parking structure, nearly equal in size to the new hospital I mentioned before.  The problem with Southern California architecture, as they've said in the LA Times, is that the car always wins.  It loomed over that horizon, mostly featureless, mostly concrete, a gray reminder of the view of the hills we've mostly given up.

I gave Shasta a hug, and told him that everything is going to be OK, and that we were here to see a sunrise.  But he's a dog, and I think we know who I was really trying to convince.

By this time, the sky had grown to a light blue, with pinkish high clouds in the far distance.  The wind was calm at first, but it steadily grew in force in the ten minutes before sunrise.  A final gust of wind heralded the arrival of the sun, as the very first rays broke across the hills.

About two minutes later, my own first ray of sunlight flashes into my eyes, filtered through the wide branches of a distant star pine.  I point it out to Shasta, but he's still not really getting why he's up here on the roof sitting on his human's lap.  But hey, it's different and something to do.

The sun's disc quickly resolved into its proper shape, and we stood up, taking in the new year.  I felt a sense of relief, that I had really and finally escaped the last year.

But then I really looked around.  The world I had seen filled with soft shades and hazy colors was no more.  It had suddenly sharpened into a world filled with strong lines of light and shadow.  So much more light, but so many more shadows crisply defined by the hilltops, palm trees, and walls.  Daybreak is the moment when everything just changes.

I like to think of our lives here on Earth as something like a sunset.  That is to say, we live such a short time, surrounded by incredible beauty and rapid change, before we head into the unknown night.

But sunrise too has power.  And maybe it describes us just as well.  Perhaps we humans are still at the beginning of all things.  And at a time like now, we can see the shadow and the light clearly for the first time in a long time.

Everything looks a little different now than it did last year.  The light and shadow are so clearly defined.  But there are so many colors now too, and those colors will shine.  Now that we can see all the shadows, we can awaken into the light.

Well, eventually.  I was still pretty sleepy, so it was time for me and Shasta to head back to bed for a bit.  The day was ready for us, but we were still not quite ready for the day.

First Sunrise 2014

This is the second entry in my series on watching the first sunrise of the year, which is known as Hatsuhi no De (初日の出, "first day's rising"), or simply hatsuhi.  Last year, I tried out the ritual just as kind of a curiosity, but I thought it might be interesting to repeat this year as well.  And I think I just may have learned something new.

Being a habitual night owl, I woke up this morning to the sound of the alarm on my new iPhone.  Last year, I used an old, original model iPhone, but my new job bought me a shiny new gold smartphone as part of the hiring package.  This might seem like bragging, but it's actually an important part of the story.

I pulled on some warm clothes, I had set aside last night, went outside, and scrambled once again up the ladder unto the roof.  Unlike last year, this New Year's was a beautiful day, with a clear blue sky and nothing but the faintest wisps of cirriform clouds draped over the horizon.  The weak Santa Ana winds of the past week had done their job, making me feel quite comfortable, even on the cold black roof.

I looked to the south first, and paused to recognize that the giant ficus tree I mentioned last year is truly gone.  A bowl of green tilted towards the afternoon sun, it had stood nearly six stories tall.  The Friday before Christmas, a crew came and trimmed the tree down to a mere Mohawk-cut of leaves; they returned the following Monday to finish the job, working into the evening to remove even the stump.  All that effort from sixty years of growth, gone in mere days, shredded into tiny chunks.

And in the place of the giant tree, there was a void.  It revealed small houses, small cars, and the tiniest bit more ocean view -- but mostly, empty sky.  The crows that had been my companions the first time remained distant, their home destroyed by the saw.  My closest companion this year was a lone pigeon, but he seemed interested in neither me nor the sunrise, and soon flapped away.

The world, however, was still coming alive.  I could hear plenty of crows' calls and finches' tweets all around.  And the first few people started walking past, into the calm morning dawn.  However, it was still quiet at my neighbor's, where the remains of last night's party littered the concrete-capped courtyard.

Another neighbor had a mural painted on his backyard fence, and from this angle I could see the edge of the blue sky and verdant hills in the image.  This couldn't be a bigger contrast to the actual hills to the north, which remain a stubborn, unseasonable brown, the result of three years of drought.

Part of the hills were masked by brand-new, six-story structure of steel beams, with white work lights glowing dimly on four of the floors.  The uppermost beam bears an American flag and a rather beaten-up Christmas tree, while another beam proudly proclaims in spray-painted letters, "HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY OWEN".

The building is still new enough that I can see through to the brown hillside behind, but I know that this can't last.  Last year, the space was nothing but empty air; this year it is a bustling construction zone.  Next year, it will be a new wing of a hospital.  And every day will bring new stories to the building, of illnesses treated, lives saved, and lives lost.  What was empty space will become a place where people get a new start on life, or will have to grieve for their loved ones.

It is not that place yet.  But as I took my first look around in the morning twilight, I couldn't help but be struck by how different things looked.  Here I was, standing on the same roof in the same place, exactly one year ago, but the world around had changed.  And in my own pocket was an iPhone, a token showing how much I had changed too.  Brent the NEET had been transformed into Brent the Salaryman.  And just like that hospital, I would continue to change.

Even nature itself never stops changing -- the hills behind the hospital began to pick up patches of light and shadow.  The sun was coming up, for real this time.

Out of the northwest, a jet passed directly over my head (though I didn't notice the extra weight on my head).  And in its wake, it left a lone contrail, a single straight line clear across the entire sky.  And as the plane flew into the southwest, the Sun just began to peek over the mountains, with the first direct rays filtering through a star pine.

And as the Sun rose to assume its full sphere, I let out a little cry of joy.  I had seen the first sunrise this time!  I had made it to this point in time and space once again, and there's something beautiful about that.

I lingered a little longer, looking at the world bisected by the contrail.  The lost giant tree and long shadows lingered to the southwest; the new hospital, drought-parched hills, and the rising sun lied in the northeast hemisphere.  And here I was in the middle of it, my world divided in twain at the new year.

It was clear I had only one way to go.  And that was back towards the "past", because I sure as hell wasn't going to get off the roof without a ladder.

Just as before, I crawled back into bed, and began to ponder what I had seen.  Now, I finally get the point of staying up this early to see the first morning sun. I saw a reflection of Japanese concept of mono no aware (物の哀れ), the awareness of the impermanence of things.  Sometimes, it's important to reflect on past and how things are always changing, and this ritual is but one way.

Some changes are good, some are bad, but we must go on.  The tree is lost, but the crows of last year, Phobos and Deimos, have hopefully found a new home.  I've lost much of my free time, but found an excellent job.  And somewhere out there, eventually, Baby Owen is going to have the time of his life.

First Sunrise 2013

Last year, I managed to wake myself up early enough to see the first sunrise of the year , because I managed to convince myself that it was "research" for writing my fanfic.  This is a Japanese custom known as Hatsuhi (初日 - literally "first day"), where people will go outside, often together, to catch the first rays of light of the new year.  I didn't have a blog last year to share this on, but I did write an account in an email to a friend.

If you did watch the Rose Parade [in 2013], you may have noticed that it was not particularly sunny, but the weather wasn't bad -- just a broken altostratus deck.  So there was a good chance that I would see new sun as it shed the first light on the new year.

I woke up at around 6:50, and threw on a flannel shirt over my flannel pajamas. When I first woke up, the sky was still dark enough that I could see a couple of planets, but dark clouds obscured most everything but the bright gibbous moon.  I got out a ladder and set it up against the house -- the lightest part of the sky was behind the orange tree, so I had to climb up to get a better view.

The black shingle of the roof was cold to the touch, but the wind was calm, and I still warm from bed.  I ambled up the the apex of the garage, so as not to wake anyone up, and turned towards the eastern sky.  There were still a lot of trees -- more than I had thought there were in my neighborhood -- but it was obvious from the clouds that I wasn't going to see sunrise directly.  The appointed time, 7:03, came and went, with only a slight brightening of the eastern sky.  Of course, I thought -- the sun's gotta rise above the Santa Monica Mountains.  I did a quick calculation: 3° above the horizon is about 10 minutes -- and settled down to wait.

A pair of crows joined me on a nearby power line, staring eastward too.  The sky started to brighten as the sunlight filtered to the bottom of the clouds, and suddenly the gloomy sky was replaced with a warm glow.  Everything started to come alive, and the finches started singing their calls, telling all of the other birds, "Hark, awaken, for a new day has come, everyone be excited.  I'm going to tweet to everyone I know, Happy New Year!  Hey everyone, wake up!"  And then of course, they stopped, because everyone knows only 140 characters can fit into a tweet.

The crows, whom by this point I had nicknamed Phobos and Deimos, awaited the sunrise.  And then, finally, the bottom of the clouds at the horizon was lined with a golden glow.  And, that was it.  Phobos cawed to Deimos, "Huh, is that it?"  They looked on for a moment more, before the reply came from Deimos, "Yeah, I guess that's all it's gonna be."  Some crows in the large ficus behind us called out, and my crow friends departed to join their friends for the day.

But, I had gotten up especially for this, so I was undeterred.  It looked like a break in the clouds was up a little bit further, and I was definitely going to catch the first rays of sun.  A man passed by, walking a dog, disturbing the canine living next door.  I took the chance to look at the hills, and the sky, and the strip of ocean to the south.  Things really do look different from up high, so I took in the view of the house's roofs as a pair of house finches zoomed by me.

And then, ten minutes later, the sun finally broke through the clouds -- well -- partially.  It was still obscured by the clouds, so I couldn't see the golden disk.  But I saw a bright enough glow to etch the afterimage into my eyes.  I blinked, and the image of the sun's light through the clouds formed a shape that looked exactly like this: ^_^   The sun had smiled upon my weeaboo endeavor, and blessed me with an Asian smiley for the new year.  And with that, I accepted the blessing and headed back down to a warm bed.