Dawn, on the slopes of Monte Rosa

What dawn is not, is obviousness. It is a rare and complex simplicity, even though free, for those who want to spy on its arrival. I stand on the top of the mountains, where its taste is more delicate and deep. The dark air, full of fear and uncertainty, leaves room, like a caress, for the warmth of existence.
Each dawn marks both the birth of a new day and the time, little by little. Every day is never the same, as time is composed of the same amount of seconds, but always different from each other. Time seems to be immobile but changeable. Someone may call it relativity of things; I prefer to refer to it as the subjectivity of the incomprehensible.
If the photographer is a light hunter, what is the mountaineer if not a dawn hunter? Both of them go in search of that extended moment, of that deformation in which the rationality of the phenomenon is undermined by the wonder of the soul. The photographer captures it with his own hands, the hunter with his eyes. It is irrational to fix it with the mind. In fact, I have never heard anyone exclaiming “What a magnificent refraction and diffraction of photons in contact with the atmosphere!”. Instead it is inhuman to have never seen one.

Dawn expands the eye with shapes and shades that are never the same. Its sound also changes overtime, the crunchy silence on the snow or the hiss of the wind in the grass, or even a deep and fast breath that goes off into infinity. It may taste like the blood of burning bronchi, or of the earth like a thirsty mouth. It can have the consistency of hot, rough rock or melting millennial ice. It sometimes smells of freedom, other times of death. Dawn is the sixth sense, an extrasensory perception. Sometimes it’s missing, and you can’t do anything but feel the lack of it.

I prefer dawns to sunsets for the same reason I prefer the beginning to the end.
I was a little sixteen year old guy the first time I saw one. Special and classic at the same time. A perfect “V” valley with the sun rising in the middle, more or less like any child would paint. I doubted I would have seen many dawns in my life. To be honest I didn’t even think that my life would rotate so much around the mountains. Mountains and photography have gloriously condemned my senses to that unparalleled marvel that can be rigorously perfected over time.

Is there such a thing as the perfect dawn? Yes and no.
I always wonder when it will be.
I imagine the place and the shape. I think of the shades of the sky and the size of the clouds. I also think if there will be clouds or if it will be a clear sky. I imagine the sun, if it will go up shy or if it will be a fireball? I observe which will be the portion of the valley to take the first light and which will be its darker parts. I think about the animals in the forest, when it will be the first chirping and which will be the first larch to ignite.
The most beautiful dawn always comes, by surprise, always different. It is a mutual expectation, a meeting on the peaks of the world, because we know, the world from the top of the mountains is simply more beautiful. The perfect dawn exists whenever it occurs.

The meaning of life belongs to that moment, when everything is blossoming and reborn.
I’m alert, I’m alive.
Sometimes I think I could die there right here, with a grin on my mouth.
I am everything and nothing, I am center and edge, I am dark and light.