The Impossible Perfection of a Morning

I leave my blinds up each night so I can see the stars, and last night I was rewarded with an impossibly perfect framing of the Milky Way through my window. There is something about seeing the stars when you are half asleep and half awake, something both comforting and evocative. Anyway, if I had a thought as I drifted into the dream world, it was something like "It can't get much better than this." And then, it did.

It got better, because that impossibly perfect, starry sky was filtered away and replaced by a morning that was yet another version of impossible perfection. I won't try and describe it. Words would be a pale substitute, and even my best photos would dim it into something other than what I knew it to be, for it was a morning "like the first morning." The light on the meadow, the sparkle of gold on the blue of the sea . . . everything. seemed to announce itself as if it was tickled to be alive and begin the day. It felt like Eden, absolutely new, and. I knew I had gone "back to the Garden" to be part of it all.

Should I be a fool and grab another twenty minutes of sleep? No, I should jump up and run into the meadow with a dance of "Yes, yes and more yes!" I didn't do either of those things, but I did linger a while watching the morning change moment by moment as the new light altered the seascape and the meadow. In that lingering, it came to me that this was an invitation to participate, and that this invitation arrived each morning at my doorstep, and all too often I turned over and went back to sleep: return to sender, no one at this address.

Having been in my new home just a few days now, I have given some thought to new beginnings. I have wanted to create new routines thoughtfully, at the level of ritual, rather than falling into repetitive habits that require no mindful attention. This impossibly perfect morning brought home to me that new beginnings are offered to us again and again, as often as we choose to pause and listen. The invitation is ever-present: "Come, be part of the morning, and decide how you will be a partner in this dance. Awaken! Go off auto-pilot and co-author the morning, for surely you are part of its perfection, too, if you have courage to receive it, to know and be known."

I write these words from a place of great beauty, where ocean, meadow and sky make it easy to recognize the gifts of new beginnings. Yet, I believe in the perfection of the morning, wherever we live, and that if we pay even the slightest attention, that invitation to begin in a new way will offer itself to our imagination, again and again.