I woke this morning an hour earlier than needed. After spending a few minutes lying in bed, looking at the light seeping through the window, I got up, went downstairs, and made toast and coffee.
I drank my coffee standing before the window, looking through the bare trees and over the roofs to the pale, robin's-egg blue sky of pre-dawn. I love the silhouette of bare tree limbs against a morning sky. "The fractal geometry of trees", I once heard someone say, although I forget where and when. Like the winter stars, the trace of a branching tree strikes me at a base level, deep in the solar plexus, shortening my breath and making my heart skip a beat. Like the sight of a burning bush on a mountainside.
Morning always seems a miracle to me. Perhaps it does to everyone... I don't know. Maybe my experience does not differ from anyone else's. But I've seen mornings in so many ways, and under so many different circumstances. As nothing more than a lightening of the darkness after a long graveyard shift. As a promise that life will go on, after sleepless hours of despair and mourning. As a beautiful, familiar face looking into mine. As a promise of warmth, when the sun first fires the mountain peaks. As mist lifting to the adventure of new day.
After warming my toes on the heating vent, I came upstairs and finished my coffee while writing this blog. Sue came down the stairs, in the rumpled, soft brown sweater that she wears as pajamas. She smiled, my world turned, and I held her tightly. I hear her now, bustling about the kitchen downstairs. I'll go down in a moment to refill my mug. Soon Ben will rise (Tom's at his Mum's). I'll pick up the car, and we'll head out through the forests and wetlands along Highway 7, on our way to Hamilton for Brinkley's wedding, with the sun behind us and the world before us.
Morning is God's promise of heaven here on Earth. What a life.
