Aren’t all beginnings new? Where does a beginning start –when I recognize my own beginning? My morning begins in the dark when tangled in dreams and thoughts I emerge. Often I burrow deeper into my pillows filtering through what I remember from the night’s journey. Sometimes I begin in prayer. Other times I simple get out of bed, put my slippers on as my cat, Merton, brushes against my feet, hungry and impatient. He has been my guardian while I slept. I take the stairs carefully. White Christmas lights twist around the banister. I leave them on as I find them a good nightlight.
I feed Merton and pop the button of the coffee maker I set up the night before. I heat my mug with hot water. As the coffee brews I look out the kitchen window into darkness. I know the woods are there and perhaps the deer. I read the quotes I have tacked around the windows. My morning mug is from New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. It has a drawing of a monk facing a butterfly on it. I fry an egg and toast a piece of rye bread. Taking all with me- the coffee, cream and raw sugar, top it with whipped cream and a dash of cinnamon, I sit on the couch by the window watching the sky change. Some people would say it is still night – 4:00am and others say it is morning. These are my monk hours- solitary and with a peace beyond words – a profound silence within.
When does the day begin – sometimes before I see it since it all rolls over – time without beginning or end? My waking is a passage through time. – universal – sacred. Grateful I begin again.
Dawnings, duskings, mornings, noons and nights.
What light strews through the letters! Look. See?
You do, you have.
In the hour after afternoon the sun has me betwixt. Here, upon the top of this hill, through the full length window in my kitchen’s porch door, I look out to the bay and the north-east lying islands as they catch the setting sun’s casting. This light blazes the fir trees ringing their circumference right down to where a band of snow buffers the bay as it lays blue. The islands hum, levitate they anchor the sea for night as the light slowly fades up over their faces as to let them rest.
I turn to sit at the kitchen table and watch the south-westerly view though the slant angles of the four other windows of my apartment. It is a slice of treetops and rooves with mute chimneys over which the sun is heading low and reaching back through my blinds which I have opened for this very time of day.
The quietness sustains the sounds of kids passing by down on the street, getting home in time, the kids I ride the bus with in the morning, them off to school, I to work. Branches scrape the glowing, yellow siding of the neighbors house a driveways length away. Icicles glisten and drip from the gutter and the light flows slowly from the room. The refrigerator rumbles, quivers into some small burst of equilibrium, and the kitchens falls finally into silhouette.
I sit. Too soon to light a lamp.
After another moment I stand and turn and look back out the window of my kitchen door to the bay, through the branches of the close, towering trees wrapping my porch.
The black birds have retired for the night. Still, though, there are gulls in flight.