What is cleaning but love, for what is love if it isn’t a commitment to repetition, to finding the ever-smaller bits of something or someone, to rooting out their infinite fractal possibilities and paying attention to each one? That’s what waking up early, on safari or to go birding, or for any other nature reason, feels like to me. You wake up early because it’s a little bit painful and because that’s when the animals are getting up and also because that’s how the day presents itself in its openness, its faceted gorgeousness, from the dung beetle and exhausted lioness of Africa to the egrets fishing for their breakfast in Maryland; nothing is set yet, at dawn. It’s all mutable, muted in sound, muted in the soft, downy light floating across land and water and animals alike.