What Time is the Sunrise?
Our health and our creativity need us to come out of our heads and into our bodies.
Before we start….
There is a lot going on in the world right now, a lot to pay attention to, a lot to feel. As wrote this week in regards to what is happening in Israel and Gaza: “I’m not writing about it because there are so many people writing about it with more skill and perspective, and sometimes the best thing you can do as a writer (or just a person) is read others.” I’m thankful for the reading links that she included in that piece (and her interview with Myisha Cherry), and in general, I have been actively trying to read and not just doomscroll.
Today’s essay is all about being in our bodies. In a time that feels tumultuous, when it’s easy to feel entirely overpowered by the news, coming back into our bodies does feel like a reminder that we may need. If nothing else, so that we can continue to do what we do as humans: feel, empathize, connect.
Do you know what time the sunrise is?
This seems like a simple question. After all, the sun does rise pretty reliably in the morning.
But really, what time does the sun rise right now where you live? Do you get up when it’s still dark out? And if so, do you know at what time the sky starts to change? What are the colors? How does the light shift? When does dawn turn to daylight?
I was at a conference last week in Montana, and there was a panel about health. Nutritionist Johnna Sutton noted that when she meets a new patient, asking about the sunrise is often one of her first questions. I was intrigued by this being a starting point for understanding someone’s wellness and asked her why.
“Going outside begins a hormonal cascade in our brains—cortisol and melatonin, insulin, leptin, etc. that we need for balance between our biological systems in our bodies,” says Sutton. “By asking a person this question I can tell whether or not they are connected to the natural world, whether or not they even go outside. You'd be surprised how many people spend most of their waking hours indoors, behind windshields, and in front screens.”
Our indoor lives can easily consume us, but even a little dose of the outdoors can help. There’s research on the importance of exposing the body to natural light first thing in the day. Sunlight helps release serotonin, and has an impact on our mood. Getting some first thing in the morning can even aid in our sleep cycles.
Regardless of whether or not a dose of morning sun is proven to be good for you, the answer to the question of sunrise paints a larger picture.
“If a person does not even know when sunrise is, that tells me they don't go outside very often, if at all,” says Sutton. “That is a huge indicator of their level of disconnection from the natural world—of which we are a part as natural biological creatures—so, therefore, how disconnected they are from themselves.”
Because of a variety of circumstances, we can’t always catch a sunrise. But we can catch the cues that the world and our bodies give us.
“When we get outside and are physically present, standing on the ground and looking at the horizon with naked eyes, or digging in the dirt, or sitting on the grass, we get into our body, which helps the chaos in our brain slow down.”
- Johnna Sutton
Sutton noted another commonality in many patients: trusting a watch or phone to tell them about certain physical and health indicators, like quality of sleep. “They’ll say ‘it says I didn’t get enough sleep.’ I ask them, ‘do you feel tired?’ And then they’ll say, ‘no, I feel great.’”
Odd, right? We’re trusting a device over our own physical feelings. That’s not how we’re meant to function. As Sutton puts it, “we are natural biological creatures regulated not by thermostats, Apple watches, Bluetooth-regulated lighting systems and alarms, but by the sun and the moon, day, and night.”
It’s easy to look at your phone and find out what time the sunrise is. It takes more work to learn the moment the sky changes, how the colors evolve, and when they are at their most intense. It takes trusting the unknown to realize that you have no idea whether there will be colors in tomorrow’s sunrise or not, but perhaps it’s still worth paying attention.
“Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.” - Mary Oliver
Over the last couple of weeks I have been taking photos of fall colors, and this too highlights a similar dependence on technology to tell us about a thing instead of trusting our own senses to learn about about the thing.
The fall colors have been captivating, but on the phone screen, those photos are never quite how I see the colors in front of me. The red in a stem comes off as pale pink, bright golden yellow of leaves swaying in the wind are washed out and meek, the contrast of faded golden grass and the grey and blue inklings of a blustery morning sky are left entirely flat.
I enjoy making digital color palettes with an app on my phone—you get a fun selection of squares of digital color that align with what’s in your image. But that doesn’t mean it captures the color that you see with your own eyes.
Color is, after all, incredibly personal, a matter of light. Which is why it can feel so beautiful to put a swatch of paint down on a page, or mix up a color palette—that act of making is only possible after an act of seeing.
Often, instead of trusting what’s in front of us, we trust what’s on the screen. We trust the graphs, we trust the numbers. Whatever data you want, you can get, and as Sutton pointed out, we’re surrounded by it. We want to be told what is right instead of feeling and figuring out what is in front of us. In that quest to be “right”—to not have to fail, to not make mistakes, to not sit in the messy part of not knowing—we avoid our intuition, we avoid listening, learning, and making our own connections.
“When we are in our heads busily over-analyzing and comparing ourselves to images of others, checklists from media and podcasts, and behaviors/expectations we've learned, we are unable to recognize signals from our own bodies,” says Sutton.
To be in your body is to pay attention to those signals so that you can respond and adjust, and in a time when our minds can so easily spiral, so easily find themselves in a loop, that simple act of reconnecting feels more important than ever. “When we get outside and are physically present, standing on the ground and looking at the horizon with naked eyes, or digging in the dirt, or sitting on the grass, we get into our body, which helps the chaos in our brain slow down,” says Sutton.
It’s so easy to think that creative answers can be found in our heads—that if we just dig a little more, turn the problem around one more time, we’ll figure it out. But most often, those answers are in our bodies.
Think about what it feels like to go for a walk when you’ve been stuck on formulating an idea or an essay. Or what it feels like to ride a bike when you’re in the midst of a big project that just doesn’t quite feel like it’s working. The movement unblocks.
This isn’t just about blocks, it is about being in ourselves and in the world. We need not just to think, but to feel.
There’s an excellent drawing exercise that I use a lot in workshops called blind contour drawing, which I refer to as “conscious contour drawing” thanks to my art education professor friend
. I love this exercise for a variety of reasons, but it is very much an exercise that helps connect us to the present moment. It is about overriding our overthinking, over critical brain. The two main guidelines are that it’s a continuous drawing, and you don’t pick up your pen or pencil, and once you start drawing you don’t look at your paper—you look solely at your subject.For a few minutes it’s just you, the page, the weight of your drawing device in your hand, and what you’re looking at.
Artist
shared an illustrated column recently about putting this exercise to use in San Francisco, setting up a table and having two strangers sit down draw each other. As she writes, “distracted by the challenge of drawing each other, people eased into what they really were doing: seeing each other.”This too is an act of sitting down, dropping out of our heads and into our bodies. Into the moment. That becomes the seed for connection—not assuming what we know about someone, but remaining curious and open to what we might learn.
“Art does not come from thinking but from responding.” - Corita Kent
On my last day in Montana, I was meeting someone for morning coffee. I went outside early to pump up the tires on my friend’s bike that I was borrowing. A trusty old Schwinn cruiser with coaster brakes. The sun was just rising, and the sky was gently covered in swaths of pink. I went back inside and told my friend and her daughter—who were in the midst of morning prep before going to work and school—to take just a moment to look out the window with me, that cotton candy color visible even from indoors.
When I left a little bit later, I pedaled next to the river, the bike path covered in yellow leaves. The last remnants of pink hung in the sky. The air had a nip to it, but you could tell the day would warm up quickly. The path was empty, so I wove the bike back and forth, as if I was a kid discovering the freeing feeling of a bicycle for the first time. It felt nice to just be in the moment.
There’s no happiness-ometer or way for me to track that. No data to tell me I felt connected to the world around me.
It’s simply a feeling.
-Anna
“I realized I had been living in an abstract universe in which people thousands of miles apart communicated via images, opinion statements, and isolated facts, echoing or arguing with each other not in conversation but in an endless void of nonstop images, opinions, facts…” a beautiful essay from
.I shared this quote in last weekend’s prompt for paid subscribers, but I figured everyone probably needed to hear it: “An educated person knows their own gifts and how to give them to the world.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer
An open letter from the art community calling for an immediate ceasefire and the opening of Gaza’s crossings to allow humanitarian aid in, which you can sign on to if you would like. The People’s Forum is also doing an Artists Against Apartheid letter.
A beautiful composition that sounds like you’re listening to rain pattering on the window.
Submit protest posters to Outlet PDX.
If you like this newsletter then you’ll probably love the weekend edition of Creative Fuel. It goes out every Saturday to paid subscribers, and includes some creative musings as well as a prompt. Plus you can look forward to December when I’ll be doing yet another edition of my digital advent calendar.
Spots for the Singla creative retreat go on sale on November 1 at 9am PT. More info here.
I’ve started doing one-on-one creative mentoring sessions. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, please get in touch!
Over at Creative Fuel Collective,
is teaching a moody weather watercolor workshop next weekend, and I am very excited about the recent addition of Personal Finance for Creative Humans led by Maria Kleiber. If money feels like a block to you, this is the workshop you want to attend!There are the weekly free Creative Fuel Wednesday sessions too. A place for art, community, and connection. More info here.
My 2024 calendar is arriving from the printer any day now. Preorder through the weekend and get free shipping.
