Dawn

I got nothing. Nothing. I sit here staring at the monitor, waiting for something to percolate to the surface. Nothing. What flits around the peripheral edges of my consciousness is a butterfly, a light, flutter of something that feels faintly positive. I don’t want to capture the butterfly. I don’t even want to look at it directly, for fear it will fly away. If I just sit here very still, maybe it won’t notice me. And my reward will be the quiet observation of a beautiful moment while a butterfly skips from flower to flower…..thought to happy thought…..without a care or a threat.

Why is writing about positive moments so difficult? It’s easy for me to write about taking a negative situation and making the best of it. I can mate the glass half empty to the glass half full, leaving a practical, useful pair of socks. I am good at making lemonade or lemon poppyseed bread or lemon meltaways from those sour lemons that life tosses my way.

But I sit here stupefied when the general sense of things…..the milieu of the morning…is optimism, contentment, maybe even happy. It is quite refreshing to have a clear head without the chatter of “this and that”. Contentment mutes those nagging worries, the To-do list, the Not-Yet-Done list. And so I sit hear floating on the calm, undulating water of peace.

And ah…there it is….the awareness that stuff is coming. The Day Is Coming. The list begins to form, ordering itself by priority. In those seconds before dawn, when you sit in the greying light, the birds wake and make their morning calls, the distant sound of a few cars up on the road can be heard…..you sense the day is coming. The light breaks in the east and it begins. Time to get up, pour a second cup of coffee and get ready for the day.

But on mornings blessed with this fleeting pause, I carry forward a thin layer of protection, inside a bubble of grace. I am shielded or maybe immunized. And maybe this vaccination wanes and the contagion of pessimism brings me low at some point in the future. But for now, I think I have weathered this last season and I have gotten my shots for the future. The future always holds the potential harbinger of a mutated strain of something ugly, never-before-seen or a recurrence of a strain that decimated us in the past; those threats are never completely gone. This quiet morning…..these last few quiet mornings….I think the winds have shifted. And the sun has sent its first shimmer rays above the horizon and the greyness ebbs away.

The day has begun.