WE SAY THE DAY DAWNS when the sun’s leading edge floats over the horizon, or when we wake, or when any truth becomes known, or when the sky brightens enough to dispel demons, vampires, trolls, and other light-hating villains. Women used to be named “Dawn” as a charm to protect them against evil. Mata Hari, the stage name of infamous Dutch actress, courtesan, and spy Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (1876–1917), means “the eye of the day” (from the Malay mata, “eye,” and hari, “dawn, day”). English for day’s eye is daisy, the flower whose petals open at dawn and close at twilight. But many nuances of dawn lighten our world.
The dawn that banishes evil spirits is astronomical dawn, well before sunrise when, technically, the sun dangles 18 degrees below the horizon. Then comes nautical dawn, when the horizon and some objects become visible but the sun still hangs 12 degrees below the horizon. In civil dawn, the final hour before sunrise, the sun rides only 6 degrees below the horizon, high enough to clarify objects, emblazon the sky with light, and allow work to begin. And there’s the farmer’s friend, rooster dawn. The ancient Romans divided the day into sixteen pieces of one and a half hours each beginning at midnight. Roosters crowed in the third watch, the diliculum, or morning twilight, which gives us our word dawn.
Most languages honor dawn with one short word. But in ancient Japan, the day was divided into twelve two-hour watches, each named after a zodiacal sign, further segmented into quarters. The months were classified by signal natural events: Rice-sprouting Month, Watery Month, Frost Month, etc. And the “year-periods” were labeled by the Japanese government. So, to specify dawn (6:00 a.m.) on February 15, A.D. 998, I would have to write: “The fourth quarter of the watch of the Tiger on the fifteenth day of the Sprouting Month in the fourth year of the Chotoku year-period, in which the Elder Brother of the Earth coincided with the sign of the Dog.”
All dawns delight me. No two people experience the same dawn, psychologically or literally. On the equator, dawn unfolds in minutes; at the poles it can stretch for hours. Only as dawn’s final drama does the sun actually rise. We say “rise” with typical human self-centeredness, as if we could bend even a third-magnitude star to our will. Rolling from west to east, the earth keeps tilting different faces to the sun, which appears to rise. “Night falls,” we say, as if it were the closing curtain in a one-act play. But, really, day falls—we fall toward and roll away from the sun. As we do, the cold shadow we call night rises all around us and the star-baked earth begins to lose its warmth, until dawn, when we face the sun’s hot breath once more.
On clear days, I look up at the edgeless blue and follow it in my mind’s eye to where sky becomes outer space. Then I say silently, always with reverent surprise, as if it had just occurred to me for the first time: We live on a planet, a planet in space, surrounded by millions of other planets and suns. And on this planet, eons ago, by chance life evolved. Then I picture the cavalcade of life, from grub-like strings of bacteria and knobs of blue-green algae through weird mammals to people, in suits and shoes, driving metal shells, talking into electronic ears, having dinner dates, creating art, craving love, living in palatial huts.
How strange and eye-poppingly wonderful it is to live on a planet in space, and to be alive with intelligence, maybe something unique thus far in our relatively young universe. I’m often startled by this thought, like the way you flinch when someone surprises you. How unlikely, and what an adventure. For me, it’s important to wake up often to our true nature and circumstance, to remember how lucky and fleeting it is just being alive. Most often that happens outside, while walking or biking in the country, or enjoying a park in the manicured wilderness of a city.
Being in nature at dawn always comforts me. I say that as a sort of shorthand, because it’s really a mental knot. I do find it comforting to be in nature. But how can you be in what you are? All of our being, juices, flesh, and spirit occurs as nature; nature surrounds, permeates, effervesces in, and includes us. At the end of our days it deranges and disassembles us like old toys banished to the basement. There, once living beings, we return to our non-living elements, but still and forever remain a part of nature.
Maybe using the word “wilderness” would feel truer than “nature.” Like circus lions, we’ll always be wild and fiercely unpredictable. We build more curious habitats than other animals, who, to the best of my knowledge, don’t require anything like electric cow-milk frothing machines, beeswax on a flaming string, or vaporized flower essence mixed with musk from the anal sac of civets, to encourage breeding. But I could be wrong. Maybe the wren’s adagio is equally extravagant. And I’m reluctant to hazard a guess about the necking and petting of alligators, whose cheeks are studded with exquisitely sensitive pleasure nodes. Even at our most domesticated and tame, we’re like pet zebras or grizzly bears, dangerous to anger, always flirting with a tantrum just under the well-behaved surface.
For me, nature means the full wallet of Creation, which sometimes requires a little quantum thinking if I want to include the earliest stages of the universe. I see, in my mental picture frame, a tough silky ball of hydrogen floating in an endless ether. Then parallel universes that collided and mamboed apart. Nature includes both the one and the many, the squirmingly minute and the invisibly huge.
The word naturally has at least two meanings in most languages. First, and originally, the ways of the natural world, as in the naturally changing seasons because Earth circles the Sun. And then there’s the “but of course, it stands to reason” naturally used to emphasize what goes without saying, and then saying it anyway. Just as dawn follows night, it implies, what I’m going to say is inevitable, an agreed-upon truth indisputable as the Alps. The words nature and naturally come from the Latin natura (the dawn, character, and drama of life), which stems from an even older word, nasci, “to be born” from an ancient mother.
In 2000, Chinese scientists unearthed a 125-million-year-old fossil of a rodent-like creature they named Eomaia scan-soria, “dawn mother.” Whenever we call someone a rat we’re really harking back to our earliest ancestors, tiny tree-hugging placental rodents that fled from the feet and teeth of dinosaurs by scurrying up any available tree. After the dinosaurs died out, dawn mothers could safely emerge, and they thrived, in time turning into all sorts of species. We descended from those tree shrews—ive-inch-long mousy little beings that weighed under a pound, used hardy claws to climb, ate insects, and were all fur and appetite. They were the first creatures to nourish a baby inside the mother’s body, the first mammal of the sort that populates the earth today with elephants and wombats and weasels and humans. Let others appeal to Aurora, Eos, and other goddesses when they wake. I prefer to thank the small, timid dawn mother in us all.