I’m on my way to meet my friends. Driving across a half-frozen spring valley of the waking morning. Come with me for a few moments.
The cold spring sky begins to shape my thoughts affecting my mood and dazzling my eyes.
It’s as if someone with a sharpened No.2 pencil is carving bare deciduous limbs into the morning canvas of the bitter-cold sunrise—the canvas of green, now purple, indigo and blue. The pencil scratches the tree-line horizon into the unfolding sunrise.
I can smell the steaming cup of coffee rattling in the holder to my right. The fragrant vapour churns the ever-diminishing fog of my morning mind. I am groggy; the coffee helps.
The Morning Artist etches charcoal pencil flecks into the glow of the morning. The etching looks like pines on the southern ridgeline. Their silhouettes look black against the wonder-smeared morning.
Blasted sleep blurs and burns my eyes. It’s too quiet to think out loud, so I keep everything in my head.
Prayers.
Complaints.
Worries.
The cold hurts my fingers gripping the steering wheel, but I’ll be there soon.
Blink, blink, blink.
Three lights flicker on the farm to my right. I imagine the waking morning inside the stone house that sits between the barn and silos; the smells of morning food, the soft acts of tossing blankets, and the sounds of crackling wood.
And from the wood, the smoke rises from the chimney and smears its own shade of light grey into the frame of the waking countryside. The rising smoke signals the fading night fading into life. Just to the right of Polaris sits the bright moon; that pale sliver hanging beside this dream and that. All is waking.
Over the river and through the woods, the hill, the bend, the here and after. I approach the end of my drive to the diner and listen to the pencil scratching, the rubbing, the smearing, the crackling, the sipping, and the cries of the all-encompassing morning.
Just then, when the staccato of my groggy mind eases to the allegro rise of the blasting sun, I stop shivering and warm to the music all around. It's as if I'm witnessing the creation moments all rolled into one.
Let there be light.
Let there be day.
Let there be you and let there be me.
The Counterpoints of Life
As I wait for my friends, mid this chaotic symphony of the morning rise, I hear Eliot’s whimper and Psyche’s sister1 and remember that life and death, pain and pride and all the shadows of life rise together.
I remember the serpent. He is cunning. “You shall surely not die," he said, "You are gods.” And we walked into the shadows.
Even on this day of days, this sleight-of-hand time of nonchalance and banter, the shadows rise with us all and seep into charcoal smears of stick-figure carvings of winter’s barren trees. The shadows enter the frame and sour, don’t they?
Yet I am not dismayed or weakened by the presence of shadows.
On the contrary, I now think out loud of the stories I know of heroes and villains, of music I love—major key and bright, minor key and sad, of people I know—decent and decadent. How extravagant these things make life, this fugue-like tension of point and counterpoint. Every day it is there and it is undeniable.
At the Diner
I’m on time and already sipping my second cup of coffee when the others arrive.
At breakfast, we sit with our own agenda: inquiry, testing, obligation, love and need. The diner coffee isn’t so friendly; weak, but hot, it draws us closer to the table, to our mugs and to each other.
The day heaves into a kind of brilliance as we exchange laughter and smiles, aloof gestures and glances at mobile phones, etcetera, etcetera.
Then, here comes the hurry. Off we go now, to nowhere and to no one in particular.
Monday, beautiful. Another beginning. Another rising. Another chance to make it right.
Give us glory. Give us life. Give us the steadfastness of “another.”
A season fades. A new season comes. And we live in the brilliance of a fading night.
Our hope gathers in the etching and painting of our Artist Father.
This is a reference to T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land." Eliot ends the poem with these lines: "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." The reference to Psyche's sister comes from C.S. Lewis' masterpiece Till We Have Faces. The beautiful Psyche (Lewis's protagonist) has a sister who is ugly. She loves Psyche but struggles with intense jealousy.
Ponder provoking... 💓