Dawn: A Watercolor Ode to the Primeval Conversation Between Our Living Planet and Its Dying Star

“You have found an intermediate space… where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his transcendent portrait of the transition from sleep to wakefulness. The experience of waking — that phase transition between the liquid phantasmagoria of the unconscious and the solidity of conscious life — reveals the mind to itself. “All the world is mind,” the teenage Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. To watch the world come awake is to contact the essence of its worldness, to begin apprehending the majesty and mystery of what makes this third-rate rock an irreplaceable wonder.

Marc Martin conjures up the magic of this liminality in Dawn (public library) — a lush watercolor serenade to life coming alive on the threshold between night and day, this primeval conversation between our living planet and its dying star.

Half a century after artist Uri Shulevitz’s watercolor masterpiece of the same title, Martin tessellates morning’s mosaic of wonder — the dragonfly shimmering in the reeds, the dandelion haloed by the golden light, the trees swaying against the glowing sky, the songbird sounding its first note of day.

Couple Dawn with Italian artist Alessandro Sanna’s watercolor serenade to the seasons, then revisit Martin’s painted love letter to starling murmurations.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

newsletter

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.