Self-Care
What the Morning Golden Hour Gave Me
Long before the new day utters its list of demands, I have learned to claim a little light for prayer, creativity and myself.
Janeen Constantino
As a photographer, I have spent years chasing the golden hour, learning how that first light can change an image.
When I started claiming that first quiet hour before the day began, when morning felt like a gift, I was deep in clueless, hot-flash menopause and all the things that come with it.
Everything and everybody irritated me. As a busy wife and mother putting out everybody else’s fires before 8 a.m., there was no room for me to think, create or breathe. I was drowning.
Then I discovered the power of that golden hour of light and quiet every morning, and it straightened my pearls. What kind of self-care could I make out of a golden hour or two just for me?
As a professional photographer, I seek out that soft, low-angled light to make an image sing. There is a golden hour before sunset, too, but with standard time returning and the clocks turning back, morning light is a timely thing to consider. Getting up at 4 in the morning for anything other than a pee break or a flight might sound crazy, but I eased into it, setting the alarm a little earlier each week until the groove came naturally. The key, it seems, is the WHY.
What Do You Do With a Golden Hour? Whatever You Want!
So I kept that hour to myself. I didn’t tell anybody, not even the people or the dog who lived in the house with me. Most days, my beautiful practice has stayed the same for more than two decades: I wake up, take three deep breaths, then meditate and pray for a bit. I ask for focus. I ask for answers. I take a little time to talk to my ancestors, too.
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These glorious early mornings give me the bandwidth to hear those voices with clarity, and that quiet has become the place where my spiritual life, my well-being and my creativity meet.
From there, my two forms of creativity start talking to each other. I may take my fountain pen and notebook and jot down ideas for essays or short stories, or let the words marinate for days or even weeks until they decide what they truly want to be. Once I got deep into photography, I started using that quiet to edit pictures, too, as if the images were telling me their early-morning story. My best writing, my most intentional photo edits and my most centered decisions happen in that little office with the light of the golden hour pouring in.
L. Toni Lewis, M.D., founder of Liberation Health Strategies and my go-to on aging issues, helped me think through whether regularly claiming the morning golden hour would catch up with me as I got older. According to Dr. Lewis, “there is an intentional rhythm to our elders in a lot of spaces around the country and around the world, where having that time to get yourself together or just to ‘BE’ is an intentional thing.” She assured me that as long as I am getting a solid 7 or 8 hours out of the 24-hour day, I would be fine. And I am pretty intentional about blessed naps and calling it a day before 9.
That reassurance matters, because early rising only works if it isn’t stealing from the sleep my body still needs. Some older sleepers are early risers like me, growing into ourselves during the first hour of sunrise. The National Institute on Aging notes that older adults generally still need about seven to nine hours of sleep, even though sleep patterns can shift with age and make earlier bedtimes and earlier wake-ups more common. And a University of Pittsburgh study of adults over 65 suggests that people with early, active and consistent daily routines tend to do better on cognitive tests than those whose activity patterns are less regular.
The golden hour and the way it leads me into the lens of my day mean just as much to me now as they did when I first started savoring it 20 years ago. I still use that time to see the big picture of my day and make “shot lists,” the way a photographer or filmmaker maps out the scenes they need, only mine help me storyboard what needs my attention before the world starts asking for it.
Sometimes I dance. I still ask the Creator for what I think I need. And even though I start the day awash in early peace and quiet, the energy of the light helps me feel no ways tired.
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