If I had recorded it on my phone the video would have only lasted 15 seconds. It happened near the tunnel by the lake.

An atomic, blood-red orb rose up from nothing beneath the dark silhouette of tree line across the lake. Leaves have not yet returned, so it was an outline with a jagged edge from naked hardwood branches and spears of evergreens clawing upward. The tree line was a dark-blueish blackout curtain above the contours of the land. The sun had to climb upward to be seen.

In real time it moved. I could actually see the sun rise tick by tock. Brilliant crimson hues gushed from behind the dark shapes of the horizon, torching land and water and clouds. From the corner of my eye I caught sight of the Welcome Center with its floor-to-ceiling glass flaming as if the whole structure was on fire. The intensity of the sun rising across the lake was held in those windows.

But then the sun encountered a thick bank of multi-color clouds hovering low over the earth. As the sun grew bigger and bigger, like an enormous balloon ready to pop, the top half of the it totally disappeared behind the billowy throng of vapors.

Next, the sun’s light began to seep over the top hedge of ethereal thickness. Pastel shades of pink sliced through seams and cracks all across the clouded sky. The Welcome Center windows had calmed to these same colors, as if the inside of the building was full of glowing embers. But all of that soon changed as the sun continued to rise, the clouds continued to move, and the now orange-and-yellow ball in the sky was bifurcated — half below the still-solid bank of clouds and half above it.

I wanted so badly to capture this strange yet ordinary, rare but common sunrise. It was all moving so fast and would make a fantastic movie. Alas, my phone was still on the nightstand where I left it in a rush to satiate an impatient blond pulling me into the world when all I wanted to do was sleep a little more.

“Come on then,” I slumped as I realized there would be no capture of the moment. Instead, full green and knotted baggie in hand, we walked to the bench and sat. We watched in silence, but more than watched.

We were, or at least I was, taken into the experience. From that stationary wooden bench I was pulled into the moment by senses coming to life and enfolding me into the sunrise. Suddenly, I saw the pink light reflected even in the wet rocks of Long Pier as they were being washed in the rhythm of windswept water. I heard the waves, too, just in front of me as they hit the unseen rocks below the bank. And songbirds. From every direction familiar voices I hadn’t heard since last autumn chirped and sang. For a second my brain kicked in and I tried to identify what I was hearing but then let go and climbed back into the moment.

It became clear to me that it was an orchestra of sounds and colors and motion, not fragments that just happened along. All one undulating, interacting, inextricably connected symphony. All because of the dog, I was there to be in it.

Cameron Miller of Geneva is an author and minister. His fiction and poetry are available through Amazon. Contact him through his website at subversivepreacher.org.