I follow the dawn rising into morning light

The kids are asleep. I look in on their dreaming. Their dreams bubble overhead in the air of the room. Wee invisible drip-globes a world away. My son turns, some sense that in the waking world something has shifted. I close the door and leave him to his privation.
Outside the sky is low, a weak light. The sun not quite keeking over our edge of the world yet. I decide to go out and see what the rising light might bring.
I once climbed a mountain forest in the tropics through the night led by a kerosene light. Our party emerged onto the dark morning path two thirds of the way up the mountain to a thick line of pilgrims and supplications and graces to this divine thing that seems to sit inside of us. We ascended alongside the pilgrimage, the Lord Buddha's name an element unto itself on the humble tongues of the people.
Just before dawn we reached the temple where there is an imprint of the Buddha's foot. Sri Pada. Adam's Peak, to the later Christian converts. Suddenly, at the mountain top, our line started to gather like a river against a dyke. Our river turned, faces towards the mountains waiting for the sun to emerge like the planet's bride. There was a modest arc then the blushing bride rose, swollen with the day ahead. It bowed to the Buddha, which was what we had climbed through the night and jungle noises to witness.
This morning I head out to the river. The sun is risen, but veiled. The morning holds on to its potential, seemingly unwilling to hand it over to we wasteful humans. Then, a parting as it senses the aspirations in every human heart. An aspiration for communion of one sort or the other. I am on grass, jewel-dripped dew globes, wee worlds in themselves. I get onto my knees. A soaking. Down low it is wet, organic. And amid the jeweled splendour, gathered dripping on the grass is a fungus. Ascending the fungus - antennae ready and slime climbing - is a slug in its element. There on my knees, gratitude on my lips, I see my journeying this morning. The slug's journeying. The globe of water's journey to a drip. All here in the splitting sky as the sun comes out in beams, as my children lie enclosed in their dreaming.