The awakening

What is it about January? It's cold, and it's dark. Getting up in the morning is difficult, because the pitch blackness makes it seem like all the world is asleep. And maybe it is. Though you are not the only one battling the wind, rain, snow, or whatever else the elements may throw your way, to get to work or school, it does seem like it takes the first couple of hours of the day, before anyone is actually awake. We are all a bunch of winter zombies, relentlessly striving towards some end destination without a thought in mind, except, perhaps, for longing for the day's first energy fix of morning coffee.

And then suddenly one day something happens! The lazy sun, who, unlike ourselves, gets to sleep in, yawns and stretches its rays above the horizon. The sky fills with gold, and the darkness yields to unveil a winter wonderland as beautiful as ever.

Those days make it all worthwhile. Though you had to get up at an unearthly hour, when everything was dark and depressing, the natural wonder, playing out live before your eyes, revives you like no cup of strong, black coffee could ever do. You stop in the middle of whatever you were doing to simply look. To take it all in. That's when you awake. Your mind, soul and body seems to rise with the sun.

The picture in this post is taken on one of those days, when the sun was just starting to grace the world with its rays of light. As it happened, the post has turned out to have a more poetic strike than normally, which was actually not intended, when I started writing. But that is what those sunny winter mornings do to me, so actually I find the tone quite fitting for the theme.