AWAKE THE DAWN

It's Morning. The jet stream is passing right over my house—I can see it in the clouds. John taught me to recognize it. Horsetail clouds, he called them, and they do look like the tail of a celestial horse galloping from horizon to horizon. But to me they look even more like Bridal Veil Falls on a windy day. Down here in my yard, though, it's still. Birds call. The grass is long and wet with dew, so beautiful I'm tempted not to mow it this afternoon.


Alla sent a YouTube meditation on "Morning Has Broken," by the Angels. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V3n9SyL1eU&NR=1 I listened and watched it three times, each time falling deeper into my own morning here on Sunshine Hill. Maybe I'll start each morning with a viewing of this video, at least for a while. It's Alla's birthday today; this song is her birthday party.

Today is also the fifty-first anniversary of the day I "took the veil" in the Community of Sisters of St. Joseph. The memory of gazing out the dormitory window that morning remains keen. Prairie and woods met my eyes then, and the song was that of meadowlarks. A psalm came to mind, "Awake, lyre and harp; I will awake the dawn." That day I couldn't have imagined I would ever go anywhere else, be anyone else, live any way else, hope for anything more.

We always are everything we were, and paradoxically we become new each day. Every morning is the first. T.S. Eliot always says everything so well, writing about being "still and still moving," envisioning a "further union," a "deeper communion." Maybe our lives are instant—one moment that contains all of it, and we just experience it as spread out in time. All the choices we ever made, all the joys, all the sorrows, everything given and taken, all a gleam of sunlight through a drop of dew. It's too big a thought for my poor head—but my heart is fascinated with it.

(Thanks for the photo, Krista!)