Sunrise over Kruger National Park

I've taken hundreds of pictures of beautiful sunsets all over the world. Sunsets that span the sky as far as the eye can see. Sunsets peeking through trees and over mountain tops, sinking into lakes and rivers and oceans. Sunsets of icy-cool blue-tinged yellows, of fiery-red pinks and browns, of veregated oranges shot through with gold.

But it's not of glorious sunsets that I want to write. It's not the myriads of days dying into West that stand out in my mind's eye. It's the rare sunrises I've seen that have stopped me in my tracks, that I can count my days back to...

Remember that sunset on July 5th, 1993 when we were waiting for the gates to open at Kruger National Park? Remember the blush of pink that crept up ever so slowly on the horizon, the molten gold that spread across our sights? Remember the stillness around us? The hush before daybreak? The aching calm of it all? Remember how we watched, breathless, as the pastels deepened into jewel tones, too overcome to even look at each other? Remember how the silence became a hum, then a hiss, and then a song as the sun's warmth began to wake the birds and the bees, began to stir the sap in the brush, began to seep into our skin and melt away the chill of that pre-dawn morning? Remember grabbing my hand, still not looking my way, and saying "Let's not forget this sight, this feeling, this day"?

That was more than a decade ago. I have no picture of that sunrise except as it's burned in my memory. And yet I have not forgotten. Not one single detail.

[Written during the Memoirs of the Soul writing retreat.]