Predawn: the early risers amplify the darkness with noisy combustion.  Cheerful magpies greet the morning with surrounding warble; momentarily silenced by faraway cockatoos screaming expletives.  My breath, not unlike the slow-moving fog beneath the darkened trees, rolls before me in tendrils. A fresh, hot, milky coffee warms my winter-weathered hands. Blackened windows of nearby houses randomly spark alight with morning activity. Each waking home ushers a deep thrum followed by a slow-stirring hiss as heated water collects and flows like warm lifeblood through the pipe work. I sit, westerly, watching as the sun begins to illuminate colour into the world from behind me. The cloud-blanketed sky is heavy overhead, appearing still and unmoving. Wet leaf-litter, sodden with the night’s rainstorm, has collected around me in a carpet of muted yellows and washed-out browns.  Now, later-rising native bird life, each unmistakably different, pepper the world in lively chorus. I wriggle my toes in my old but delightfully warm moccasins. My coffee, now too cold, offers my hands no reprieve from their winter-weatheredness and so I keep them tucked tightly in my lap. It is a white world, this late July morning; with its slow-rolling grey clouds in sun-dappled, radiant silver. It is here, in this crisp new day surfacing, I close my eyes to better-listen. It is meditative, the sounds of Winter, and I am reminded as I quite often am at the sun’s rise, just how glorious it is to be alive.