Morning, Before the Words

The day arrives wordless.

For a few minutes after waking, before the mind reaches for language, there is a version of the morning that has not yet been named. No plans. No date. No list assembling itself in the dark behind the eyes. Just light, and the weight of the blanket, and the fact of being here again, which is a stranger and larger fact than we usually allow it to be.

I try to stay in that few minutes. It is harder than the evening hour. The mind wakes hungry for the words.

Feet on the floor

The first instruction I give myself is small. Feet on the floor before the phone. This is the entire battle, and I lose it often.

When I win it, the morning is different. I sit on the edge of the bed and I feel the floor, actually feel it, cool under the arches, and this is enough of a task to keep the words at bay a little longer. The body knows things the mind is too quick to hear. The floor is cold. The room is dim. The light at the edge of the curtain is a particular color it will only be for another ten minutes.

Before the day has a name, it has a texture. Stay for the texture.

The first warm thing

Then the making of something warm, done slowly, as its own event rather than the prelude to a realer one.

Water coming to heat has a sound worth listening to. I have started listening to it. The small rituals of the morning, the warming, the pouring, the holding, are usually rushed through on the way to the day, treated as friction, as the tax you pay before the real thing starts. But there is no realer thing. The warming is the morning. The rest is just what you do afterward.

I hold the cup at the window. The light is coming up. The neighborhood is doing its early, half-hearted stirring, a shutter, an engine, a dog with an opinion. I do not participate yet. I am still in the wordless part, or trying to be, holding the warmth and watching the blue go gold.

Letting the words in

There is a moment when the words come back, and it cannot be postponed forever, nor should it. The day needs its language. The plans are real. The list, tedious as it is, is also the shape of a life with people and obligations and things that matter.

But I have learned to notice the exact moment the words return, and to let them in gently rather than all at once. To say to the day, quietly, all right, you can speak now. And the day speaks, and the morning proper begins, and I go into it having kept, for a few minutes, the oldest and simplest thing, which is the sensation of being awake before anyone told me what the day was for.

Feet on the floor. The first warm thing. The light at the curtain's edge. The rest can wait a little. It always could.