I am a morning person. What I mean by that is that much of my inspiration for being alive comes from what happens in the early morning.
As the sun slinks its way through the wooded trees, the call of the cardinal warming itself in the emerging light prompts me to notice both the cool on one of my cheeks and the warmth from the sun on the other. Its sprinkling light across the still shadowy base on the ground speaks a language of peace to me.
The sorting and rinsing of sleep often drops me off at the door of the waiting morning a little more poised. It asks me what I want to do in the new day with what it gave me. The welcoming sun sits patiently, wondering what I have come up with. As I lean back against the question, it gives me the chance to dispose of the chaff of my attention and consider, across the landscape of what is in front of me, what I want to respond to.
Not every day, of course, is like this. But I have noticed, over time, that the opportunity to embrace this beckoning is often there when I make the choice to awaken to it.
A honking goose overhead backgrounds notion to the things that are already being done, regardless of my participation. The ecology on display in early sunlight reminds me that all is well in the systems that ultimately matter. The trees are awake and doing their thing — existing, sharing, working, providing for all that lives among and below its branches.
I can’t help but feel a more proper kind of aliveness when I step out from the confines of my slumber and into the gentle easing-into of the coming day.
Surely it will bring its normal demands (on top of the ones that I tend to already have). But the morning pause to consider what I’m actually seeing, hearing, and feeling at the cellular level sets something right within me. It makes me want to linger, for just a moment longer, to absorb what is really happening, before I race off to my ever-present list of gotta–get–dones.
I need to know that I need this time. Because when I forget it, I quickly become lost in things of little substance, and lose my sense of aliveness from which I experience life. The slow dawning of my daily merging with it sets a pace consistent with most of the natural order of things and gives me a chance to align myself with it.
The unheralded questions about the nature of my participation in the broader realities of existence can go a little less answered against the mysteries of the enjoyment of this simple start.
Whatever is sublime about the cohabitation of visceral morning realities and these mysteries strike me as the stuff of the divine. Many things have been organized around what that exactly is. And, it occurs to me that those exact requirements are among the things that deviate from it.
So, the genius of such simple things as a cool sunlit morning, with all of its accessories — like a red-flash of flying feather across my path — is that it is there every day. And, much of all I have to do, is to get up and open my door to it.
The sooner I get started each day, the better.
