January|Night  The word sun is only three letters. When St. Francis was dying, he wrote a poem to the sun.

January|Midday  The sun is high, and I’m racing her. She doesn't waver on her steady path across sky in my place on this earth in the northern edge of the square that is Colorado. And the steadiness is maddening to someone who is so prone to fits and starts. Sister sun, it hurts to watch you make light across the day so faithfully. My soul wants to make light faithfully, too. Will you teach me?

February|Midafternoon   The way you warm my feet with your blessed sunshine coming through the universe and this window and onto my cold toes, it makes me grin.

March|Midmorning   Everyone in this house has colds, but the sun, the sun is bright-eyed and clear. No runny nose, no wheezy cough, no achy muscles. Just clear, taut, and ringing with the day.

March|Midday   No wind. Blue skies, with just the smallest wisps of white clouds that promise not to be any trouble, and you’re unfurling this pocket of a wound, so tenderly whispering over it, clicking and clucking and shushing and murmuring like the mother of all mothers.

April|Evening   Every day the sun is dying a little more. Only 5 billion years left.

April|Midafternoon   I am tired of the spring wind and the bright, cold sun that keeps creeping across the sky. I am tired of myself today, tired and frustrated enough to let out a scream, like a child—a real howling aaahhh! My dog is startled and pokes his head up, his muzzle and eyes rising out of the blanket he was burrowed under. He looks at me, and I look back at him, suddenly grateful for his witness. He holds his gaze, alert and attentive, until I soften, smile, and say something in the everything’s-okay voice.Then he goes back to his nap—tucking his face into the burrow he’s created, and it looks so nice, sister sun, with your afternoon light hitting it just right. So I walk over and put my face in the blankets that are warm and put my nose against his wet nose and breathe in the boredom and the anger and the sunshine. This.

May|Dawn   Thank you to the soft gray light tripping into this window and across my body, making me here.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 47.