Tag: morning

Categories
Hiking Journal Outdoors

Moments At Dawn

It is nearly five in the morning and the dawn light is filtering through the curtains. For an hour I have been up, after having been woken by some clowns who decided to have some fireworks fun outside my window. All is tranquil again, though, and the air is ringing with the orchestra of crickets, winding down the finale of the night. The trees are so still I can feel the soil breathe.

In about an hour my alarm will go off and the business of activities will intervene. My wife and I will join two friends and go for a two day hike in Yatsugatake, a range of mountains that yearly draws me almost like a spiritual fulcrum. The weather forecast says rain, as it nearly always does whenever I plan a hike recently, but the release of the strings to my apartment will make all the difference, as will, of course, the comfort of watching and joining good friends in laughter and stories. It’s been a long time.

Color hasn’t yet infiltrated the scenery outside. The greens of the false acacia and the errant avocado still harbor the grays of midnight and the horizon has yet to toss up the fireball of the sun. An in-between time that half echoes the voice of my thoughts, where my night self and my day self meet at the parting of some inchoate veil. It is as if my breath incorporates my spirit, hanging inside and out, not quite corporeal, and yet imaginary at the same time. If I were to wake up to the world one day to the absence of humanity, this is what the city might feel like. For a while. Before my own realization of lost purpose.

I lift my eyes to the sky, now brightening and introducing birds. I wager the first call will be the brown-eared bulbul’s, always brash and brave and eager to get going. It is the kind of cheery attitude that makes waking and forging on worthwhile; the kind of spirit that walkers in the mountains seem to wear on their sleeves. It is perhaps the basis of my faith; heralding life as it is and rejoicing in yet another turn of the great circle.

Categories
Journal Musings Nature Spiritual Connection

Winter Beams

Lodgepole Pines
Lodgepole pines limned in hoarfrost, near Bend, Oregon, U.S.A. 1980.
Lodgepole Pines
Lodgepole pines limned in hoarfrost, near Bend, Oregon, U.S.A. 1980.

The sunlight is delivering peace this afternoon, alighting upon the window pane and and sifting through to the walls, where the white glare heats the chill like a silent furnace. Without a cloud in the sky, it seems as if all plants are turning toward the sun’s appropriation, reveling in the radiation, and offering their yearning in return. I can feel their expectation within myself, the rounding of the corner in the year, when the longest nights have slowly grazed past and the season begins to make its way uphill toward the pass, where renewal waits. It is almost expressible, this impatience for sunlight and the cry of mornings with windows thrown wide open.

Upon my window sill sit two sand dollars, three rounded stones picked from river beds, a small carved stone Boddhisatva, and a barrel cactus, tilted in its axis, toward the light. These items have traveled with me through the years and over uncertain distances, two long dead, three polished by time and elements, one brought alive by human intervention, and one still growing as it waits for water. They seem to resist time, but with the daily rolling of the great star across the window pane, they, too, seem to make an incremental passage from day to day. When I look at them I am reminded of the simple acuity of existence, when each is perceived in its whole, distinctly, uniquely itself.

The neighborhood has taken upon itself to hush up today, almost as if it were paying respect to the sun. All things hold still, resisting even breathing. When the wind blows, it restrains itself to quaking among remaining leaves, so gentle that their tenuous holds upon the mostly bare branches might still allow them yet a few more days as leaves, before they drop off and disintegrate into the soil. The sadness of autumn has passed, however, and midwinter stirs the pot. The awakening of blood only needs enough seasoning of sunlight before the sauce begins to bubble. It is only a matter of time before the first thaw.

Categories
Journal Musings

North Window

Ice Pickets
Ice formations along the banks of the Charles River, Boston, U.S.A., 1988
Ice Pickets
Ice formations along the banks of the Charles River, Boston, U.S.A., 1988

 

For the past three days, just as Beth expressed in her New Year’s Day post, I have been filled with a mingled deep calm and radiating joy that seemed to flow in when I opened the living room window on the morning of the 1st. A shock of cold air greeted my nose, but there was also a dalliance of sunlight that glinted off everything, but most especially from the branches of the magnolia tree where lately the white-eyes gather in their frenetic rest stops. I stepped out into the garden, with its dried leaves and clenched soil, and just stood there breathing deeply for about five minutes. Then I stepped back inside and swept about the apartment, throwing open all the windows, letting the morning breeze in, with its bite, and busying myself with dusting the corners. When all was done I settled by the north window in my bedroom and sat still.

It was something new, because just days before, after creating three days of window rattling racket, the neighbor right outside had demolished his work shed and moved out of the house. For the first time in three years the north was quiet, without a soul moving in the small garden that never received full sunlight. I read a bit of Thich Nhat Hahn’s book, “Anger”, which makes you stop often to ponder and to let things sink in. A jungle crow barked from a distant rooftop, its voice echoing through the morning. I took to peering at everything there, in the runners of the window sill, in the crannies of the lattice panel I had put over the window to block some of the sudden openness to prying eyes, in the sky, and just in my room. The sky was filled with hazy cumulonimbus clouds without definite form, glowing pink from the warming sun. Dozens of star-shaped spider webs dotted the lattice panel, hiding the eggcases beneath. A sweet- bitter smell of decaying leaves wafted in through from the living room, stirring up pangs of hunger. My breath dispelled before my face in shreds of white tissue, disappearing into thin air. Dew clung to the window pane like a silver constellation in reverse, the slate in white instead of black. A male gnat, with feathered antennae, crouched in the nook of the lattice wood, pinched close to the corner, hiding, waiting for the hand of winter to pass. And my tea and buttered toast smoked with warmth, fingering the moment as I sipped and chewed, simple sustenance. I closed my eyes for a moment and just let the stillness wash through, feeling the cleanliness of a hungry stomach and a mind cleared of noise. Here I am, I thought. Here I am.

This slow burning away of anticipation and anxiety, of just smiling without rancor or expectation, is exactly how I wanted this new year to begin. And how this greeting of myself, as the mirror swivels, would allow me to nod and remember what last year wrought from my heart. It is not anger or fists that I want or even need. It is this calm acceptance. Somewhere in the great mechanism a gear has shifted. And I would walk from such a dawn into the open, to find a tree somewhere and sit, waiting. To not disturb the surface with a flurry of excuses, no hand-tossed crumbs of complaint or outrage. Sit still, waiting. And let the trees teach me a thing or two about peace.