My grandfather — Morfar — would wake before sunrise. This was his nature: he belonged to the early hours, to the gray-blue time before the rest of the world remembered itself.
In summer, in Bohuslän, he would take his bicycle down to the sea. And sometimes, when I was staying with them, he would take me.
The beach in early morning is a different place. The colours are not yet fully themselves — the sand pale, almost silver, the water a deep and serious blue. The gulls are there but quiet. Everything awake but not yet speaking.
We would ride without speaking much, my grandfather and I. He was not a man of many words. He showed love through presence, through the shoulder you could lean against, through the kind of stillness that says: *I am here. I am not going anywhere.*
At the beach he would sometimes take off his shoes. He was not young — he was a grandfather, solid and familiar, a man who had lived through things I could not yet imagine. But at the edge of the sea he would stand with his feet in the cold sand and breathe in a way that I recognised even then as something sacred. This was his church. This early morning, this colour before colour, this sea before the day.
I would stand beside him. I would breathe with him.
I have been searching for that feeling my whole life — the feeling of standing beside someone you love at the edge of something enormous, in the early morning, saying nothing, meaning everything.
I think this is what I am always photographing. I think this is what I am always making. The blue hour. The silence before the day. The person you love, standing at the water's edge.
The light coming.
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*From* Bloom Anyway: A Memoir