Druidry often has a strong solar component to it, and I’m aware of a number of Druids for whom greeting the sun in the morning is definitely a thing.
Like most people, I’ve spent most of my life obliged to live by clock time while ignoring my natural rhythms. However, in the last few years I’ve had much more opportunity to live without alarms in the morning and it’s given me the chance to find out what my body does when left to its own devices.
It turns out that this is a highly seasonal thing for me. I’ve always hated getting up in the dark during the winter. Being able to wake with the light means that I also tend to stay up much later at this point in the year than at any other. During the spring, I wake with the dawn, and that process becomes ever less viable as the hours of light in the day increase. At some point – probably in May, I stop waking with the dawn, and during the summer my sleep patterns tend to be erratic – heat doesn’t help with that. Then as autumn progresses, I start waking with the dawn again.
Now that I’ve had more than a year to think about it, I find it makes perfect sense that I don’t have a fixed relationship with the sun. I’m greatly affected by seasonal shifts, so my body does very different things at different times of year. No doubt other people would respond in different ways.
I’m also not surprised to find that I’m far more comfortable when I can sleep and wake according to my own needs. Clock time really hasn’t been good for me. I’m fortunate in being in a situation where I can honour my own needs and nature, and I wonder how much human health is impacted by not being able to do that.