I wrote what follows after returning to Oakland from a trip to Europe. In the throws of jet lag, I found this silver lining: rising before the birds put my mind in a state of acute observation. Now, months later, I realize that just as much as this piece really is a conversation with dawn, it is also a gentle reminder that the world is most beautiful when we choose to see it fully, and this requires the practice of being present.
Maria Popova writes that “attention is the poetry of consciousness” and I love this. There is no shortcut to being fully here. On those rare occasions that everything is silent except the palpable nowness of the present moment, we uncover new dimensions of beauty, possibility and time.
When we choose to see it, even the mundane becomes a veil for a world within a world within a world.
A conversation with dawn
Dawn sagged into view. A great pearl cloud, pregnant with rain, scudded across the valley. It promised a dark and cold Saturday, offering, this lone hour, a brief glimpse of the opaque sun. Now and then a faint streak of gold appeared across the sky, only to fold once more into the slow-moving ocean of dull gray-blue.
In this oyster of a universe I waited and watched – for thoughts flitting by, for the gentle sunrise unfolding before me, for the heart aches and bone sighs now so familiar to me.
This morning made no guarantees.
“Live me if you please,” it said. “Here you may find great joy or sorrow or seemingly nothing at all – I do not greet you so much as your senses have vanquished death once more.
Calmly you sit, drinking in my dazzling light, blissfully unaware of the biological struggle that has brought you to this place. How many ancestors lived in pitiful misery for you to now stare at ‘a view of the open sky’?
You squint your eyes and behind a veil of lashes see luminescent wings. You are fascinated by the steam running down your coffee pot, and you lap this kaleidoscopic vision into pretty words.
Where do they come from, these words? Did they exist before you sat down to write them? If we are empty vessels for the words to fill, could this be some ancient song come to bear at last, or have you merely deluded yourself, preoccupied with this palimpsest of your true perceptions?
You see, everything here is quite unremarkable. I have given you no gifts. This has been as ordinary an hour as ever. And yet, it has been nothing short of majestic.
The dove colored clouds will assert themselves once more. Your heart will return to that place of longing. All this, as the brief, resplendent dawn roils into day.”
