Mornings may not be more spiritual, but they are quiet - and quiet is the background music for my soul. If there's one thing we need before the day of reckoning, it's the morning. We need the tune of tiny birds and light coming closer and everything yesterday becoming too far past to worry about.
We need the gradient light, the gradual rise.
The crack of dawn can set your day aright and bring the scales into balance, leveling out the chaos and endless wash cycles and troubled turmoil of people who are still sleeping.
There are no crises while the house sleeps.
I wouldn't miss it.
But I do miss it sometimes.
When my morning is sucked dry by too late or too much or too many things that pull my mind from being at rest, I miss the true wealth of the morning. I miss the point completely, with distractions and shiny things, with rabbit holes of interesting tidbits, with broody to-do lists and that inane snooze button.
I'd rather take the dawn by surprise than snooze into the day by accident, because who ever slept well in the continuing 10-minute intervals between the first alarm and the last? The oops of the snooze and head-rush of glowing red lights, blinking numbers, blood thrumming in the ears - accidental sleep makes the whole day your master.
Give me an insanely early hour for coffee and stare time, for meandering thoughts that don't require gathering and flapping wings that return again.
Give me the morning, where words are only written, not spoken.
Give me the morning as a landing for the dreams and buffer for the day.
Give me the morning, when all my prayers grow bolder and closer to the limits of all I could ask or think.
*****
Morning Poem by Mary Oliver
Every morning the world is created. Under the orange
sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches --- and the ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands
of summer lilies. If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere. And if your spirit carries within it
the thorn that is heavier than lead --- if it's all you can do to keep on trudging ---
there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted ---
each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning,
whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray