Every Friday, I drive through sunrise.

I get in my car in softening darkness, the sharpness of night-time lingering in the air outside. The hedges and lanes are blanketed in a lightening grey.

As I drive, glimmers of pink begin to streak the sky and there are glimpses of the sun’s gold behind hills and under clouds.

Soon the sky is a landscape of its own: great, rolling mountains of cloud; wisps of white; swathes of the palest blue; streaks of pink; edges of gold.

There is movement: the wind and cloud, planes blazing trails, birds in flight. The ones in flocks look like dancers.

Things are still silhouetted against the skyline. The old trees that have seen many sunrises; the young twiggy ones too; the dancing birds.

Sometimes, the sun reveals itself huge and glorious, a blazing orb. On other days, its rising is gentler, but always there is the steady insistence of day unfurling.

Strange how we forget this glorious profundity that graces our sky every morning. Every day, our beautiful, fragile planet spins and every day, sunlight dawns over the hills and the trees, over the birds in flight, over us in our beds and cars and planes.

“As sure as the sunrise”, the saying goes, and the sunrise is sure.

And I know that the world’s wars rage on, and people are hungry and people are angry. And all of us are filled with sorrow sometimes. And I know that under this sky there are mansions and shanty towns and refugee camps.

But when I drive through sunrise, I sense the messy miracle of this day on this planet and my heart swells with the singular hope and the resilience and love that humans have persisted with for generations, for days and days, centuries and centuries of still living.