Golden morning

I was awake much of the night, struggling, and after finally dozing did not wake up until about seven this morning. When I got up and went into the hall outside my room which has a sole eastern window at its end from which I can see the snowy peak of Wy‘east, Mount Hood, I saw a sky I had never seen before, and may never see again.

Portland has been under a total overcast for about a week. A high, featureless gray cloud cover from which descends an almost constant, and annoying, vague drizzle. There, visible through my unshuttered window, was a bright but dull gold overcast, seamless and universal, a reversal of the dull gray that it quickly became after about three minutes. Like the dull gold background of a medieval painting, the underside of the cloud field was illuminated almost, it seemed, from within and not by reflection, by a sun which somehow shone through a slim latticework of mists open momentarily at the far, low horizon.

I searched for the sun in vain, and could not see exactly where the light was coming from, but it must have been a little north of east, therefore from a point just left of the mountain's silhouette, also invisible through the clouds. As I watched, the unbroken goldness gradually, almost imperceptibly, evaporated into a melange of muted golds, greens, roses, and pale blues, now becoming featured as an inverted skyscape of shallow hills. Something more definite, a solar orb, bright yellow, showed itself for seconds through a final split in the latticed east, and then sunk upward into the ceiling of clouds, which now, as my eyes were drawn back to them, had almost enveloped and subdued the colorful canopy revealed seconds before. Finally, after only another half minute, nothing remained of sun or celestial tapestry, only the still, uneventful gray white opacity of morning rain.

Experienced and written on Saturday morning, 31 March, 2012.