Tracking Morning Light
Standing in the dark each morning for a November project
Today’s letter is about morning light, about getting up in the dark and standing in the kitchen to try and draw the light.
“Lighthouses are endlessly suggestive signifiers of both human isolation and our ultimate connectedness to each other.” — Virginia Woolf
Happy Sunday.
It’s been a week, and, like so many of you, my emotions are all over the place. This post is not about politics or fear or what comes next. This post is about a project that stands outside of the world right now, a project on the edges of waking, in those few seconds after I figure out what day it is, figure out what room I am in, remind myself that M has died, and glimpse the shadows of fear that hover at the edges. This is a personal project that offers a few minutes of quiet and wonder.
We do need such projects, especially those of us feeling alone, isolated, confused, angry, adrift, afraid, and heartbroken in the turmoil.
I hope you have such projects.
What I know about creative habit and personal art and writing is that it matters. On the personal level, it matters. The doing matters, and in the doing, you can find and weave and braid and strengthen a lifeline. Your habit doesn’t have to be big or time-consuming or public or lucrative to count. It just has to matter to you.
It is very clear to me that I will never learn to spin straw into gold, but I do know how to look at the light.
This letter is about one of two projects I am doing this month, a crepuscular project that requires getting up in the dark.
Thank you for reading.
Amy
PS: Morning light involves a progression from astronomical twilight to nautical twilight to civil twilight. We often refer to morning twilight as dawn, a period of time before sunrise. There is color in the sky at dawn as light from the approaching sunrise is already being scattered and refracted.
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A November Project
I started a few projects in November. I often roll into a month without a clear plan but with a handful of things I might want to do. Some of the things I promised myself I would try to do, try to safeguard, try to rekindle, and try to prioritize this November haven’t happened at all. I feel the layering of other years, other Novembers, other skies, other journeys of self. I want or need to be making myself do certain things, and yet I simply don’t. I can’t. Wanting and wishing and knowing hasn’t been enough.1
Of the few things I hoped to use as scaffolding for November, two have made it through the opening week. One is about light. I might suggest that both are, but one is overtly so, radiantly so. Both are about words, the challenge of naming, of identifying, of correlating what we see with the words that are available.
Tracking light is always a humbling exercise in vocabulary.
Both of my November projects are about reflecting and reflection, about taking moments and living inside them, occupying them fully, letting them be expansive, though one involves maybe five minutes and one opens up into an hour or more.
Both projects are extensions and manifestations of a gratitude mindset.
Knowing how things sprawl, and, really, when it comes to the shift from twilight to dawn to sunrise, there is inherent sprawl, I am going to talk about only one of the two projects today.
I am tracking morning light in November.
This is a project I’ve done before, and I am sometimes wary of repeat projects because they typically don’t end up having the same resonance, but I’m doing it differently this year. It is proving to be engaging, puzzling, humbling, and challenging. As with most solo daily projects, it is also an exercise in self-will and perseverance.
I didn’t think I would write about this project yet. Often it’s better to wait until the end of a project, when it can be talked about as a whole, when you know you’ve seen it through or can think about what happened or where it fell away. I know this could still fall apart. I know thirty days is a long time in some ways, a blink in others. I know I am tired and not sleeping well and that both things could easily knock the project over because this project depends on timing.
My November projects play out in the margins over the course of two hours, time that feels expansive and open, the morning edge of the day. This November tracking project requires time in the morning, and not just any time. I have to be up with the light, before the light.
I think the first year I did a similar project, I was already up at the right time and realized this opportunity was in front of me because to walk into the kitchen to make coffee is to walk into the face of the Sun rising in the distance. Over the roof of the house next to me, across the hillside and the city, through the trees that frame both edges of my view, beyond the building to the left that shows up in the dark or twilight as a grid of lights, and just above and behind the back edge that looks like a low undulating line of mountains, the sky changes.
In that little patch of window view, I can see the breaking day.
I am nine days in, though there was a bit of confusion on the day the time changed. Nine isn’t enough to cement a successful series, but I’ve made a good start.
Some of these thumbnails are rougher than others. Some have more or less detail. It’s almost embarrassing to show them, but it’s probably the only way to really envision what I’m talking about. Each of these is a separate full-size digital image that I’ve scaled down for this grid. Day to day, I don’t have previous mornings in view, just the one out the window in front of me. I stand in the dark kitchen, choose colors, and fill in the sky.
This is the first year I’ve used an iPad for this project, which means it is also the first year I’ve done this light tracking project with color rather than just in words and ink lines. In the past, I was mapping the geometry of the lines and bands of color and trying to name them.
This year, I am focused on recording the color in the sky by grabbing color from the wheel and dropping it into place.
(Ironically, I almost prefer the look of the first day with the rough and messy lines and schematic. There is something about it that speaks to me, but experimenting with the daily rendering and making use of what digital offers is part of the project.)
What Time is Sunrise?
The timing has been a challenge (and a bit of a mystery), but beyond that, it took a few days for me to find a flow that reinforces the recording of color as the goal. The series isn’t about getting better at drawing the frame of the kitchen window in the dark, the ledge of sad succulents, or the trees framing the view. After a few days, I decided that trying to plot those in each morning was an unnecessary exercise, so I sketched them in on morning five and am reusing the same overlay each day. It’s a bit heavy. It’s messy. It doesn’t strike me as very accurate. I could and probably should redo it. But each morning, I am not really looking at those things. I am looking through and beyond. I am looking at the negative space into which the color flows.
Day 4
I stood in the dark kitchen, even before I peed, iPad in hand, and looked out the window. I have to either slightly lift or slightly stoop to catch the color as it otherwise falls just behind the mullion.
This is the first year doing it in color, and it is such a different experience. In the past, it was an exercise in seeing, but also an exercise in vocabulary. What would I call each of the colors I saw? How would I describe the bands of color and light? How did these bands all fit together?
The first year, I grabbed a piece of paper each morning and drew the frame of the window and the shape of the sky and diagrammed the color.
My notes from previous years are scattered. They still spill out of different piles now and again, disorienting. Sometimes I’ve picked up a scrawled scrap of paper, unsure at first what I was looking at and then recognizing my dawn lines, my diagrams of sky.
My tracking of morning light has often been messy, an exercise in intention more than art.
Day 5
The morning light timing is off. I wake at 1:30 and 3:30 and 4:30 and 5:30, at which point I say “snooze.” I get up with the next sound, pushing aside the Election Day anxiety that is married today to time-critical decisions about the house, calls that have to be made. I pad down the dark hall, tell Alexa to turn the living room light to twenty percent, grab the iPad, and walk into the kitchen.
It’s still totally dark out.
Yesterday at this time, I caught the light.
Confused, I try to take a photo of the window frame, thinking that I might be able to make a template, making it easier each day to focus on the color. The camera first takes a photo with flash, which makes it look like it’s totally light in the room. I turn the flash off (unsure how it even kicked in since I never use it), and try again. The camera fills in the scene. It shows me a sunrise that isn’t yet there.
What I see on the screen looks as if the sunrise has started. But it hasn’t. I keep lowering the phone, peeking over the edge, double checking. The view is dark. The phone is making it up. It is filling in what it thinks should be there. The phone refuses to capture the reality of what I see.2
I try several times to change the exposure or the focus to force the camera to honor the dark in front of me, but the phone insists it sees a sunrise in the distance that is not there.
Giving up on the frame, I set a timer for five minutes and lose myself in reading someone else’s grief, a heartbreaking family medical story. I make some notes on various tests and readings that were part of the daily checking last year, specificity I lost when I instantly lost access to the medical record.
When I went back in to draw, the color had just appeared low in the distance. I work from the bottom up, trying first to capture the blue at the bottom, which I think of as a purple-blue but which doesn’t make any sense when I look at my options on the color wheel and slide anywhere near purple. There wasn’t a lot of color, but there was a very clear line of land at the horizon (the purple-blue), with a thin line of a deep orange above, and then softer yellow-orange moving up to a more diffuse and pale golden yellow, and then a steely blue sky, wispy patches of blue interspersed with orange, and then evening out (rounding above) to an unbroken blue.
As I continued to draw, the light continued to intensify.
I was done. I had captured my view, but it was also changing. I kept grabbing new colors, trying to put in a few new lines. It was odd, watching the shift in color and intensity in motion. Calling it quits, I made coffee and sat to finish the thumbnail, gathering the layers, cleaning the edges, and adding the date. A bit of a blur on the color stack diffuses things in a way that my old diagrams never could. I am torn about this diffusion, this softening, even though it maps to what I’ve seen.
Based on yesterday, I thought I had to be up by 5:45 to catch it. Based on today, I’m wondering if 6:15 would be better. Tomorrow, I’ll try 6.
Day 6
It’s 6:21 now, the morning thumbnail done. The timing was pretty good. I am capturing the shifting tones of dawn, more so than sunrise. As I stood looking at the bands of color, it was a very pale peach at the bottom along the horizon edge, a narrow vertical strip, with a vivid but thin, intense red-orange line at the upper edge, meeting the deeper blue-gray. I was painting all that in, trying to match those colors as quickly as I could, and in those minutes, the color kept widening and spreading.
The color was rising.
The deep orange was broadening, a really intense red-orange that looked like it had magenta in it, but not when looking at the flat colors on my screen. At the bottom, the softer orange was replaced by a pale blue at the horizon. Everything shifted, and by the time I made my coffee and looked again, the whole sky was orange and dappled.
I’m seeing the shift of time in a way I never did when I just drew in a diagram, which probably took less than a minute. This process, even as quickly as I’m trying to do it, still takes a few minutes (less than five).
Having the window frame already drawn really helped today.
Day 7
The frame isn’t really accurate. I’ve captured a broader swathe of rectangle in a square space. There is some malformation, some compression, some liberty being taken to create a frame that at least suggests the contours of the window view.
Some of how I interpret what I see In this window, some in silhouette and some simply in the dark, the frame of trees, the horizon line that appears to have some mountainous line, is not not one hundred percent logical.
The first year I did this project, I always felt like I was looking out over some grassland or savannah scene, partly because of the shape and silhouette of the trees which frame the view, partly because of the undefined mountainous line at the far edge. Partly, I can’t gauge the distance. I don’t exactly know what it is I see, what it is that shows up so clearly at dawn. I know that I’m looking out over the Bay, from many miles away, and that there are many layers being compressed and flattened into my thumbnail of morning light. The trees are close to me. Beyond the immediate roof and houses that sit below it, the trees are, really, just down the hill, but I don’t know what the land formation is at the back edge. It is the edge of the world in this view, and it appears as if it is a low-lying strip of mountains from a storybook.
I puzzle over these things, almost idly. I don’t completely care. I don’t need to name the mountains (which are not mountains). These are just little wisps of curiosity that float along the edges.
What I’m doing is diagramming the light. I say that I’m tracking light, but in the beginning, I was literally diagramming the bands of daily light. This year I am doing less diagramming and more concretely filling in the color. The geometry feels like it is missing and with that the specificity of the naming, of writing in the colors and drawing little arrows to show what went where, a paint-by-number approach to sky. There is a trade-off between these digital brushes, dipped in color and simple lines in pen and ink.
I am not being asked to name the color, to give specificity and poetry to the view. (Maybe I will revise my process in the coming week.)
Day 9
By the time I stood in front of the window in the kitchen, it was already quite light out. The sky was virtually colorless, just the palest of peach at the bottom and no blue. Even in the arcing of the ceiling of the world, there was no blue this morning. Today, there were rusty tones low and scattered throughout the rise, faded, somehow a mix of the dustier blues and oranges fading to a softened rust. These rusty tones have surprised me this week.
I used the watercolor brush this morning (for the first time). (Yesterday I tried the gouache brush.) I didn’t like it or how the color goes down. It doesn’t feel like my experience of using watercolor.
As I stood there for five minutes, grabbing colors and trying to put in some of the wispy bits of color breaking the pale sky, things kept changing. Brighter hints of a more intense, pink-red-orange showed up here and there, just halos in places, lines of a more intense color rimming other lines. Sometimes I blinked just to make sure that I was seeing the colors because I knew that seconds before they were not there.
I know I am seeing the differential between dawn and sunrise, the difference a few minutes makes in my sense of the morning sky, the transition in motion.
Witnessing the color changing this way is similar to watching clouds drift across the sky. If I wasn’t trying to capture the color, I might not even notice the shifting, but since I am trying to capture color, there is the sense of always running behind, trying to capture the best of the color for the morning. There is the sense of not being able to keep up because as one color is added, other lines I just painted have already changed.
I remind myself to fill in the space and stop. I captured one view, one brief span of moments from a shifting tableaux. If I had snapped a hundred photos over a period of five minutes, they would each differ in the color and view they captured. They would all be the same sky and yet different.
They would be sky.
They would be dawn.
They would be sunrise.
They would be morning.
They would be this morning.
They would be today.
They would be me,
looking.
They would be me,
standing in the dark in the kitchen,
having not even stopped yet to pee.
They would be me looking in
confusion at the color wheel
at the rusts
at the shifting
at the shimmer
of something that blends
fuchsia and red with such
fire that I don’t find it on the wheel.
It stands out wrongly,
false
artificial
when a line is added.
I double-tap to erase and leave it out
though I know what I saw.
This is me,
looking.
Kindling a Gratitude Mindset
For me, the most powerful November projects have been ones that invite me to look, to see, to reflect, and to contemplate my relationship with gratitude. This “tracking of morning light” project may look odd (or clumsy or messy or childish or whatever you may have thought when you saw the thumbnails), but the intentionality behind it, behind standing there in the dark again and again, sets the stage. It puts me in a different mindset each morning, one that is reflective, quiet, and calm, one that has gratitude in the dappling.
Weeks 44 and 45 in My Illustrated Journal
I scaled down over the summer, and it was probably the right decision at the time, but I am glad to have finished that smaller journal and moved back into the familiar A4 size. Things feel more open and more comfortable.
I encourage anyone interested in keeping an illustrated journal to jump in at any time. There are many approaches and books and wonderful examples and workshops and tutorials that you can follow for beautiful inspiration. But all you really need to do is start making daily notes and adding some form of illustration.
I post weekly prompts that are designed to help you fill space and nudge you to find things you might draw or write about. But you can really use any combination of words and illustration and mark making to fill your pages.
If this is something you are thinking about doing in 2025 as a project, I encourage you to consider starting now, or at any point between now and the end of the year and getting a feel for how it works to fill pages this way. This can help build momentum and a little bit of comfort to carry you into the new year. Besides, this is a project you really can start at any time. It’s like walking into a revolving door. You can slide in whenever it feels right.
Note: I draw with a small group of women once a week via Zoom. If this is something you are interested in, please reach out to me. It’s casual and easy.
Related and Other Posts
A “Morning Stories” series that comes to mind, although it wasn’t a “dawn” series
Widowed—Almost Five Months In (partially paywalled)
Weekly Bits and Pieces
Made It?
Thank you for reading along! I always enjoy your comments and invite you to chime in. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.
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It is puzzling at times why some things we know we need or would be good for us are hard to bring about, while other things that seem more difficult, take more time, or involve real shifts in the day, sometimes work, almost against all odds.
I had a conversation about this a month or so ago with a coworker in terms of galaxy and moon photos. (I guess many experienced something that may have been similar with photos of the aurora.) But I was shocked to see the phone camera completely filling in light that was absolutely not there, adding a rim of sun that was not there. I know this technology is out there in phone cameras, but I didn’t think this was true for my phone right now.
The thumbnails are lovely Amy, I love the color exploration.
beautiful series