Dawn every day

Of course there's a dawn every day whether I see it or not. Now that we're into autumn dawn will be late enough that I will see it every day, or nearly. I can have breakfast and watch the sky flaming from color to color. That was impossible all the years I lived in the city. Sometimes, like these red-sky mornings, I can't help but remember Kipling's Mandalay where "the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay." -- confession time: I wrote that line differently then looked it up and those are Kipling's spellings. I'm very grateful to my friend, Ellen, who told me many times about questions I'd ask that I could do a search and find out. I don't always succeed, there's a skill to searching the internet and I have not mastered it completely but I found the poem quickly. How exotic it was! And still is, really.

As I'm still reading Mary Oliver's poems and she writes often of being up before dawn and walking the woods and marshes, it seems a dedication to her love of nature that is much greater than mine [and most other people's] which is why her perspective is unique today when people are so separated from nature.

Also, this is Columbus Day -- a strange phenomenon as many people write. That we should honor a man who did not "discover America" but only some of the Caribbean islands which he thought to the end of his life was part of Asia, and who, in later years ruled them very badly. If we needed an autumn holiday I think it would have been better of celebrate Golden Leaves Day or something of the sort. But no one asked me and I doubt my opinion would have carried much weight.