It may not have been first light; this is urban civilization in the twenty-first century and there is always light. Inside the house there was no color and forms were shadowy and indistinct but it wasn't black night. I woke up thinking about the pain emanating from my leg, about the Perseid meteor shower, about the lack of wind, and about schools and my vision for education. I got up briefly to confirm the sleeping position of the fur-footed members of my household then curled back down with the warm dog until birdsong.
It is a point of view, my vision of education; not a roster of content or of competencies but a way of seeing differently: semiotics, teleology, epistemology, mathematical logic. Only one of those is even modestly defined which says something about my project. (One dare not say such things as "well defined" or "completely defined" for fear of running into the buzzsaw of definitional jargon.)
Thinking about ways of seeing as first light grows toward dawn is as appropriate as any philosophic scheduling which occurs to me. It is fitting to ponder clarifying interior sight while enrobed by growing exterior light. The visibility of shape, the first awareness of color, the first call of the bird; they signify nothing and yet signal everything, are not directed toward any goal and yet serve the most fundamental purposes, denote nothing and yet mean everything.
In actual reality our minds can be either more or less poetic. Like the first light of morning we are shadowy and indistinct to our core and can aspire to nothing more than the perception of color, a first tentative birdcall, and the promise of midday brightness.
"It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt it not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it." (Henry David Thoreau. Walden; or Life in the Woods. 1854.)