Now

I woke up happy this morning. On the way to work, as the sun started to rise, Here comes the sun, George Harrison sang to me, here comes the sun, and I say it's all right... Joe Brown picked it up as I walked from the Metro station. The smiles returning to the faces... It feels like years since it was clear. Indeed, George. Sing it, Joe.

I wanted to get a picture of the sunrise, but it's gray here today in Maryland. Gray and damp and cool. Still, today is a day for glory - and there's glory to be seen if you look in places other than the sky. The Bartlett pears are a blaze of red beyond the building where I work, yellow and orange trees beyond them, and beyond them, beyond the mist and the river, the sun is indeed rising, even if today it's out of sight. The evergreens are green as summer, the air is damp with the promise of life-giving rain, mockingbirds and juncos and sparrows are proclaiming that life does last through the winter and in fact meets it bravely. No yellow in the sky but fire in the trees, and the winter approaching is nothing like the long one we're emerging from.

A fiery sunrise with gilt edges burning the clouds would have terribly symbolic. But maybe this is better. Not so trite, not so obvious, but truer. Because I woke up happy this morning, and so did more than half of us. But lots of people did not. Some woke up nervous, worried "Did we make the right choice? Did I make the right choice? Will it work?" Others, maybe too many others, woke up this morning, in this new day, angry, or afraid, or both. The nervous ones want us to succeed. The others - they don't. Our success threatens them. Nothing about this will be easy.

So maybe it's right, maybe it's realistic, that today there was no blaze of glory in the heavens, no light shining down into our squinting eyes. But the light came. The light is here. Those blazing trees, those gray birds, those sharp-edges of leaf and branch: we see them clearly in the dawn. The sun is there. The light is here.

O yes. It's been a long cold lonely winter. And it's not over quite yet. But here indeed comes the sun.