Morning is Breaking

 I am not a morning person by any means, but I notice that mornings always feel like a kind of womb-like rebirth: the creaking of bones, staggering out of the comfort of a quilt, the groping for the coffee kettle, etc. Mornings feel cold when I need to emerge from the cocooned warmth of my bed. Without the first sip of coffee, I wonder if mornings can be appreciated for what they are.

   Mornings, for me, symbolize two things: the primordial fear of regressing to a beginning (the fear of amnesia, perhaps) and the promise of a reset or a reappraisal of things as they "really" are without the layers of interpretations that come from whirring and buzzing thoughts. But I think the important point is to see that mornings are both continuations of previous days and new beginnings. Mornings represent a mind that is always there, present, and clear, even when we are clouded by dreams, thoughts, fears of the day, worries about the future.

     The empty canvas always seems daunting, until we start to fill it, but what if there is nothing to fill, and we can allow the flowers, the trees and whatever we are beholding to simply grace the canvas as they emerge or arrive? Maybe sometimes the canvas itself becomes part of the work of art, something that doesn't need too many strokes; only the lightest paintbrush that hints at forms without insisting that we attach to those forms or treat them as fixed and real.