Sunday, August 19, 2007

Silence

Three o'clock to five o'clock in the morning. This has become my favorite time of the day. It is so peaceful. The only sounds are the occasional humming of my refrigerator and laptop cooling fan.

It's rare to find peace and quiet in the city during normal business or weekend hours. I've found few oases that offer relief from the city's cacophony produced by rush-hour traffic, drag-race wannabes, police car sirens, ambulance sirens, fire truck sirens, speeding metro buses, speeding presidential and dignitary motorcades, military helicopters, emergency response helicopters, low-flying airplanes -- you get the picture.

The end of the 3-to-5 a.m. silence brings with it a slow but steady rise in those cursed traffic sounds. However, it also brings with it a gift: sunrise. Watching the colorful 2-hour transformation of the sky from a deep black to shades of purple and subsequent pinks and yellows and finally a brilliant blue is really rather quite spiritual.

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