Tag: Morning

Just That Kind of Day

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If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.
~Billy Collins  “Today”
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This is the kind of morning that begs to be admired from dawn’s first moment:  everything emerges from the fog so sharp and vivid bathed in golden light.

It takes away my breath at the same time as it delivers it deep within me.

How can I spring others free as I now have been sprung?
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Lifting a Veil of Gauze

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Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, 
and by degrees 
the forms and colours of things are restored to them, 
and we watch the dawn 
remaking the world in its antique pattern.
~Oscar Wilde from The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

 

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Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. 
Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
~Leonora Carrington from The Hearing Trumpet

 

 

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Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world,
and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

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Too much of my life is lived behind a gauzy veil, hiding my face and feelings so my flaws and foibles are not so obvious to the world.

Yet God lifts my veil as a groom does his bride’s;  He reminds me I’m made in His image and He wants to see me wholly to make me holy.

Just as the dawn restores with light what has dwelled in darkness, God removes our shroud of hiddenness to tell us: “You, my child, are beautiful because I made you.”

 

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Tempted to Run and Rush

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pinkdogwoodbudding

 

The duties and cares of the day crowd about us when we awake each day
– if they have not already dispelled our night’s rest.

How can everything be accommodated in one day?
When will I do this, when that?
How will it all be accomplished?

Thus agitated, we are tempted to run and rush.
And so we must take the reins in hand and remind ourselves,

“Let go of your plans. The first hour of your morning belongs to God.
Tackle the day’s work that he charges you with,
and he will give you the power to accomplish it.”
~Edith Stein from Essays on Woman

 

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Rushing headlong pell-mell tumble-bumble into the day is a specialty of mine.  Once I step out the door there isn’t a single moment of quiet breathing space until I step back in the door 12 hours later.  I realize this is a daily choice I make to live this way: no one forces me to see just one more patient (or four) or complete each chart before I leave or make sure I have responded to a hundred messages.

I would not rest well until the work is finished.

Therefore my hour of quiet starts very early in the day, usually before the sun rises or the birds start to twitter, when there is no every-fifteen-minute appointment schedule and the phone remains silent.

However the rising morning does not belong to me: God knows what I’ll need to get through the day.  He reminds me to breathe deeply, find time to smell the tulips, and take a walk with a buddy,  always remembering I’m not alone.

 

 

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The Morning After

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A lily shivered
at His passing,
supposing Him to be
the Gardener.
~Margaret D. Smith “Easter morning, yesterday”
from A Widening Light -Poems of the Incarnation

 

 

Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord.
John 21:12

 

It is too easy to let go of Easter — to slide back into the Monday routine, managing our best to survive each day, teeth gritted, as we have before.

We are so blind, thinking Him the Gardener as He passes by; we just don’t pay attention to Who is right before us, tending us.

God knows this about us.  So He meets us for breakfast today and every day and feeds us, a tangible and meaningful act of nourishing us in our most basic human needs though we’ve done nothing to deserve the gift. He cooks up fish on a beach at dawn and invites us to join Him though we have done nothing to deserve it.

The night before he shared a meal and broke bread in Emmaus to open the eyes and hearts of the blinded.

This is no mere Gardener.

When He offers me a meal,  I accept it with open eyes of gratitude, knowing the gift He hands me is nothing less than Himself.

 

 

…be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it.
Paul Harding in Tinkers

 

The Pulsation of the Soul

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wwutangle4

 

People are more themselves when joy is the fundamental thing in them,
and grief the superficial.
Melancholy should be an innocent interlude,
a tender and fugitive frame of mind;
praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.
Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday;
joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live.
~G.K. Chesterton from Orthodoxy

 

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How can I convince myself
sadness dwells lightly like a murky mist
over the surface of my soul some days
but cannot penetrate deep within.
It hovers but does not saturate.
It distracts but does not define.
If I just wait long enough,
again the sun will rise uproarious and outrageous,
drying up my melancholy
and pulse within me unceasingly
with joy.

 

mistyfrontyard

 

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The Alleviation of Dawn

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For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
~Thornton Wilder

 

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Early fall mornings often begin obscured – the low fog clings to the moist ground,  creating a muted reality of muffled sound and distorted distance.

My head feels just like this when I first wake.  I struggle to shake loose of cloudiness and clear my vision so I can take on the day.

Clarity doesn’t come from within.

The dawn burns off the fog, renders and refines landscape colors, separates light from shadow.  I too must become part of the solution instead of clouded with precipitate.

 

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A Blanket of Peace and Forgetting

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Well I know now the feel of dirt under the nails,
I know now the rhythm of furrowed ground under foot,
I have learned the sounds to listen for in the dusk,
the dawning and the noon.

I have held cornfields in the palm of my hand,
I have let the swaying wheat and rye run through my fingers,
I have learned when to be glad for sunlight and for sudden
thaw and for rain.

I know now what weariness is when the mind stops
and night is a dark blanket of peace and forgetting
and the morning breaks to the same ritual and the same
demands and the silence.
~Jane Clement from No One Can Stem the Tide

 

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I did not sleep last night — my mind would not stop, my blankets twisted in turmoil, my muscles too tight.  The worries of the day needed serious wrestling in the dark rather than settling forgotten under my pillow.

Yet morning dawns anew and I’m comforted by the rhythm of hours starting fresh.

Today I’ll get my hands dirty digging a hole deep enough to hold the worries, and tomorrow forget where exactly I buried them.

 

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Rabbit-Light

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The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

….and August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

You become a self that fills the four corners of
night.
~Wallace Stevens, from “A Rabbit As King of the Ghosts”

 

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August brims with fullness in need of emptying –
a spilling over of light and sun and heat.

With so much of everything in mid-summer,
I welcome relief
in a cool whiff of a misty morning.

Even my rabbit-light fur
is beginning to darken and in-fill
in anticipation of long dark winter days.

Like the pulsing vessels
in twitching transparent ears,
both warming and cooling,
I will fill the empty spaces.

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When the Sun Rises

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morningsherbet

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Sunrise is an event that calls forth solemn music in the very depths of our nature,
as if one’s whole being had to attune itself to the cosmos
and praise God for the new day,
praise him in the name of all the creatures that ever were or ever will be.

I look at the rising sun and feel that now upon me
falls the responsibility of seeing what all my ancestors have seen,
in the Stone Age and even before it, praising God before me.

Whether or not they praised him then, for themselves, they must praise him now in me.

When the sun rises each one of us is summoned by the living and the dead to praise God.
~Thomas Merton from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

 

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The first hints of an orange sherbet sunrise this morning began around 5:15 AM, and rapidly stretched across the eastern horizon north and south, with the colors deepening and spreading across the cloud cover. Mt. Baker and the Twin Sisters started as dark silhouettes against this palette of rich color, then began to show crags and glaciers as the sun illuminated the clouds above them. The entire farm was cast in an orange glow for a few brief seconds as the color crept higher and higher up the cloud banks overhead. Then it ended as quickly as it began.

All at once, everything returned to gray and ordinary, with no hint of the spectacular show that had just taken place. It could be dismissed so easily but must not be forgotten in our return to the routine of every breath, every step of our daily lives.

A sunrise is His smile and encouragement when we are barraged daily with discouragement. Here, free for the taking, is startling, wondrous magnificence beyond imagination — grace that brings us to our knees, especially when we are mired in gray troubled ordinariness and plainness.

Drink deeply of this.

Hold it, savor it and know:
to witness any sunrise is a chance to praise God to His smiling face.

 

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Yelling for Joy

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Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “God’s Grandeur”
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– let me yell for joy at what I have been given,
at the blessedness that I have been afforded,
at the long seasons of grace
you have spun out for me
in a great summer taffy of a life.
~A.G. Harmon from patheos.com

 

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What is all this juice and all this joy?
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Spring”

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These summer mornings I awake in a Gerard Manley Hopkins landscape~
the young poet priest combined words in suspended rhythm,
recreating the world found outside our windows
entirely in our minds even when our eyes are closed.

What is this taffy-stretched joy I feel when witnessing
what must have moved him to write?
What can be more powerful
than words that awaken in us dawn’s redeeming light?

 

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