For some reason the boys have woken up early, and they are all wiggles and wiggly teeth as they join me, two to a chair. We’re in the front yard, watching the morning arrive. The day is going to be hot, and above us each of us there is a halo of tiny insects twirling in the humid air.
Everything: our arms, and legs, our notebook paper, and the dewy grass, is damp. The mountains are all but obscured pale clouds that keep the edges of the morning close, surrounding us with the gauzy softness of dawn.
The sun has yet to make the climb its ladder of tree branches in the east.
So we sit, side by side, and I string sentences together while they string gestures. Theirs is a story of action, mine of words. And I think about how we grow still as adults, our bones and muscles full of gravity, while our children run about us, tumbling, twirling, tripping over their own lightness of being.
Sleep still plays across the edges of my mind this morning, and my attention soft. Still, I’ve showed up to watch the sun, and now it does the miraculous one more time: sending gold-fingered rays up the east edge of the morning.
So. This is what I’ve been doing to greet the day: waking earlier and writing. It isn’t enough, and what I must do and what I do get done are still a chasm apart each evening, but it’s a start. It’s showing up. It’s the beginning of a practice that I am always at the beginning of.
It’s the way I pray, the way I pay attention, the way I arrive most wholly here.
Hello day. Happy solstice everyone.