Morning in the garden. Holly blossoms in the air. I move some ferns and plant some impatiens. As I plunge my hands into the worked soil, I feel connected to the day. Birds sing from their green perches.
I measure the warmth, the freedom of being outside in shirt sleeves before 8 a.m. It’s a good way to live.
My neighbor, Nancy, reads my mind: “I love mornings in the garden, don’t you?” She’s on her daily walk. I will soon be on mine, too.
No epiphany today, despite the date. In its place, some sights and sounds. On my walk this morning the eastern sky was streaked pink and orange, a parfait of dawn. As the sun rose and the sky lightened, contrails made lacy white stripes through the blue.
Birds were active today, jays and robins and crows all chirping and hopping and flitting about. I decided that bird song in the morning is a sure-fire way to improve the day.
At the end of my walk, I heard a strange bark-like noise and turned my head just in time to see a plump red fox trot through the meadow. He moved like our dog Copper does, with pluck and verve and a bit of a waddle. When he reached the woods he turned and posed, then ambled on. I felt his wildness in my bones.
Full disclosure here: My daughter Claire suggested this post. I emailed her Saturday night to remind her to “fall back.” She’s a busy college student; I thought she might forget.
Here’s what she wrote back: “I think all my clocks turned themselves back. You should blog about that. Now clocks turn themselves back. Computers, phones, you know.”
She’s onto something, I think. Not just that the ritual of “falling back,” that satisfying stoppage of time, is more often accomplished by a distant satellite these days. But also about the digital divide. Look at the wrists of young people; you won’t see many watches. I wonder, too, how many clocks they’re buying. My guess is precious few. When time is always in the palm of your hand, why display it on a wall?
The very concept of a timepiece, of a device whose only purpose is to tell time, is going the way of the slide rule. As a watch-wearer, cuckoo-clock owner and occasional Luddite, I find something to lament about that.
Today, thanks to our springtime sacrifice, we receive an extra hour — the gift of time. It’s still early enough in the day that I can contemplate how to spend it:
Sixty more minutes to read the Sunday paper? Two walks today instead of one? An extra-long phone call with friend or family? Cleaning the fridge? Snapping photos of autumn gold? Reading and writing? Putting the garden to bed? Making beef stew? Practicing “Sheep May Safely Graze” on the piano?
Or, how the day is starting to shape up: Letting the dog out, letting the dog in; letting the dog out, letting the dog in.
Has a certain mantraesque quality to it, no?
When I can’t sleep, sometimes Emily Dickinson comes to mind:
“Will there really be a morning? Is there such a thing as day?
And then, at the end, “Please to tell a little pilgrim/Where the place called morning lies.”
A place called morning: I imagine it gray and windswept, the land still scoured by night, a new day awakening from slumber, pulling itself together, splashing water on its face.
Or, I see it riding in on clouds of light, the most important guest at the ball. A bit overdressed, perhaps.
Or, I hear it first. Not this time of year, but in spring, when the early robin, that upstart, belts out his pre-dawn tune.
This time of year, mornings are black and still, a kingdom of stars and frost in the lamplight.
The cars are unloaded, the bags unpacked, the laundry, well let’s just say it’s “in process.” The young adults are back, sort of. And it is a culmination, is it not? A glorious jumble of conversations and cooking styles and inside jokes. It is like surfing a very big wave, though I have never surfed. It is, I should say, like that drawn-out pause at the top of the roller coaster, catching the breath before the fun begins.
On these mornings-after I tiptoe quietly through the vanishing darkness. I turn off movies, put away cereal boxes, even (supreme pleasure) tuck blankets around sleeping children.
And then I claim the early morning. It is still mine.
As the year ends I feel a need to tie up loose ends, finalize projects, complete research. Often I have no choice. I have a freelance article due. This year I’m off the hook. But I still feel pressure.
After a while, meeting deadlines becomes a habit and the urge to complete tasks is there whether the tasks are or not. It’s part of what makes me get up every morning. It’s a switch permanently stuck in the “on” position. I push myself before the holidays because they present a chunk of time during which nothing must be done. It’s the open window framing an expansive view — the pause I’ve been waiting for all year long. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting close.
In these final days of 2010, I find myself meditating on time itself. Time-keeping began in the monastery, writes Lewis Mumford. There, inside the walls of the cloister, was regularity and discipline and order — the Rule of St. Benedict, with its strict adherence to seven devotions during the day.
Regularity requires time-keeping, and by 1370 there was a well-designed modern clock. And so, says Mumford, “one is not straining the facts when one suggests that the monasteries — at one time there were forty thousand under the Benedictine rule — helped to give human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.”
As bells tolled the hours not just in monasteries but in towns and villages, time-keeping jumped the fence of the cloister and moved out into the world at large. “Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing,” Mumford writes. “As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.”
So as I dash from home to the office, as I parcel the hours of my day into discrete intervals — often wishing for nothing more than time without time — I am heir to this big invention, this new way of organizing daily life. Somehow, that makes the rushing around feel a bit more noble.
The words to the Carole King song “So Far Away” are in my head these days: “Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” Not because I’m longing for someone who’s moved away—nothing as dramatic as that. It’s more the pace of life that has me humming, the days that zoom by, the children growing up, the seasons passing. Sometimes middle age seems like one big whoosh.
But some of the disorientation is self-imposed. It comes from the constant distraction of living, of interruptions by text and email, of time disjointed and concentration broken. The “anybody” who doesn’t stay in one place anymore, that’s me.
I love this phrase. I first learned what it meant when I read The Odyssey in high school. “In the middle of things.” It’s how The Odyssey begins: in the middle of the story.
Some days begin “in medias res.” I’m catching up with myself before I’ve even begun. Today was like that. I woke up thinking about one of the 120 professor profiles I’m editing at work. Have I pulled out the sidebar information? Have I shown it to the professor? Plainly, it was time to get up.
So I did, and because my morning began before it started, I’ve tried to provide a more intentional counterpoint: I’ve read, I’ve written in my journal, and now my entry here. The weather is still and quiet, perfect for catching my breath, for attending to bird song, for feeling, in my bones, that this is a new day, a fresh start, a gift.
