November Sunrise

November Sunrise

New Mexico, “Land of Enchantment” is known for its light and spectacular sunrises and sunsets. Sunrises such as this November sunrise may not happen every day, but they do occur with remarkable regularity.

DH Lawrence stated it beautifully, and the New Mexico Magazine provided the quote:

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever. . . . the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend. . . . In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly and the old world gave way to a new.

There are all kinds of beauty in the world, thank God, though ugliness is homogeneous. . . . But for a greatness of beauty I have never experienced anything like New Mexico. As those mornings when I went with a hoe along the ditch to the canyon, at the ranch, and stood in fierce, proud silence of the Rockies, or their foothills, to look far over the desert to the blue mountains away in Arizona, blue as chalcedony, with the sagebrush desert sweeping gray-blue in between, dotted with tiny cube-crystals of houses: the vast amphitheater of lofty, indomitable desert, sweeping round to the ponderous Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the East, and coming up flush at the pine-dotted foothills of the Rockies! What splendor! Only the tawny eagle could really sail out into the splendor of it all.”

First seeing, and then photographing a sunrise requires getting up in time to see it. 🙂 That would be very easy to do if one knew the night before that a sunrise like this would occur. For this particular sunrise and photograph, I thank my cat for demanding that I get up and provide breakfast! It was definitely worth it!