Dawn is the sacred hour. We move from one world to the next accompanied by a dramatic lighting of this world.
Old Window in Finland by Helena Turpeinen, poster to View From My Window Facebook group
It wasn’t until my late 40s I was able to appreciate or regularly meet the dawn. If my sleep schedule ever regulates, I will miss these holy hours. I wake in the dark and cast off the stories my psyche told me while asleep and head for my beloved roll-top desk.
Dependent on the time of year, it could be some time before the dawning or just minutes.
But as I write the stories and sip coffee in silence, I glance over my shoulder through the atrium doors to look for the first arc of light.
It usually begins as a soft peachy pink rising with the fog over the hills and peeking through the trees. Dependent on weather and time of year, the color will sometimes intensify, sometimes wane, but always is a hearkening.
Here we are again. We made it to another day.
The silence is important.
Soon, the birds will start and the world will begin its hustle, but for a few minutes it’s just light and the creation of a new day, the creation of a new story to be told. Color on the silhouettes of the mountains bring me such contentment.
In twelve days, I will be on the shore of Lake Okeechobee in Florida. I’ve never been there before but I’ve seen sunset photos–another sacred part of the day. I am eager to nestle with my lover before leaving our bed to sit on the dock with my mug of coffee and journal. It won’t be silent – the lapping of the tide should, will, create its own sounds of peace. I am eager to see the Spanish moss hanging from the trees light up as the sun begins it ritual.
I’m sure I will photograph the scene in order to remember it, but I hope it imprints on my heart.
This is the sacred hour. Rejoice in the silence and witness the light. Turn to a new page and tell the story.
Writing Prompt: What’s Your TV ‘Comfort Food’? “Gilmore Girls”? “Friends”? “NCIS”? What show do you turn to when you are stressed, tired or just need a lift? Why?
I don’t watch television or stream shows or movies. I’m not visual and that sort of media doesn’t engage me for long. I might be tempted if there was a Silly Symphony or Looney Tunes channel I could get.
I did go through a spell where I watched Law & Order, usually SVU, for hours at a time. And I have no idea why. But it certainly wasn’t to give me a lift. It was an avoidance tactic. And it left me with disturbing images and cynical thoughts.
I’ve written elsewhere about giving up Law & Order as a New Year’s resolution one year so I won’t bore you with that story again, but I will confess that now and again – many months apart nows and agains mind you – I might turn on Law & Order while housecleaning. I don’t know why I do that either.
I do, however, have comfort music and comfort books.
When people I loved started dropping dead around me like raindrops in the April Appalachian Mountains, I developed what I call the Grief Quartet of CDs. It was actually 5 CDS as one was a double album. These were Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Allison Krauss, The Essential Leonard Cohen, AJ Roach’s Dogwood Winter, and The Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions. These 5 CDs have been in my CD changer of the Big Stereo since several days after Doug died in June of 2013. I managed through trial and error and stupid luck to attach an Echo Dot to the Big Stereo and then network it so that when I fire up the Big Stereo every Echo in the house (and I have one in every room) plays the music.
I crank it up. I pour coffee or wine or champagne. And I wallow on my Beloved Sofa, and I sink intently into listening.
My grief at losing 4 dogs, a father, a best friend, a partner and two co-workers within eight years of one another has morphed into sweet memories of days gone by. I have beatified the dead – forgotten their flaws and celebrate what made me love them.
My time with this music is now enjoyable. Music, for the most part, and this music in particular is never just background music. I listen with intent. One CD after the other. Sometimes I will use the remote to repeat a cut. Sometimes two and three times until I have wrung every drop of comfort out of the lyrics and notes that I can.
I will listen to all five of the albums. Dependent on how I am feeling as I finish the last one, I may fire up Mozart’s Jupiter symphony. I love that piece. I’ve had the CD since CDs first came out. I first listened to it with a Walkman and cheap headphones.
I also have comfort books. There are a few particular books – The Secret Garden. Skinny Legs and All. Time in its Endless Flight. The Princess Bride — That I will flip through. Or my collection of children’s pop-up books.
But every book in my house is a comfort book. I enjoy my walls of books. I like looking at them. Knowing they are there. I inherited many of them from two of the folks who died and they are mostly as of yet still unread. I don’t read like I used to. I hope to get back to it, but writing takes up a lot of my reading time.
My books are legion. I say, and people think I’m joking, that I think the only thing holding up the barn are the bookcases. It’s not a joke. The bookcases reinforced walls and the roof. I have far too many and I can’t part with any of them and I don’t need to. I live alone. There is no one to fuss about the piles of books everywhere.
But mostly I have comfort coffee.
I love sitting in this room on a quiet snowy day listening to the furnace hum as the steam from a hot cup of coffee bathes my face. I hold the cup like it is the Holy Grail. Unlike music and books, I can do other things while I drink coffee. I can think. I can write. I can make a to-do list. I can read. I can listen to music.
But I particularly like silence with the first few cups of the day. My brain is a noisy place and I sometimes can lower the talk radio in my head to a low murmur if I sit with the coffee lot enough. Multiple cups of coffee.
I always come out the other side refreshed and ready to get on with things.
You can have the noise and chaos of a television show. I’ll just be over here, sipping this coffee, letting my mind quiet and my spirit nestle like a dove who has returned home to her nest.
Upon the occasion of my divorce, I developed a deep, nagging need for a luxurious bedroom. No. I didn’t have a lover to entertain. I wanted such for me. When living at home as a young’un, my bedroom had been my sanctuary. It had been decorated with Sears French Provincial and a 70s-worthy floral wallpaper quieted down with jungle green paint on the three other walls. Pink shag carpeting.
It was in-your-face early 70s pre-teen.
I loved it.
I clocked some hours in that room. I dreamed there. Wrote bad poetry. Listened to good music. Traveled the world in books. Sanctuary.
When I left my family home for my first apartment, it was furnished. Just dreadful. But for $90 a month what can you expect. The freedom was heady, and I was never there. My first “real apartment” was a partially furnished two-bedroom duplex and I luxuriated in having a real kitchen of my own. Yes, at the tender age of 20-something I loved to cook, and I loved kitchen toys and dishes.
Eventually, I moved in with the man who would become my husband to a fully furnished house. I had little in the way of furniture, but I packed his kitchen and dining room. Piece by piece we refurnished the house from bachelor digs to earnest couple in love with antiques.
Then we moved here and undertook the barn. Put all the furniture and kitchen stuff in storage and set to on the barn conversion. We moved in far before it was habitable. But it was easier to work on that way. Turn on the television and sand drywall after dinner. That sort of thing.
The barn conversion was one step-forward-five-steps-back and after ten long, long years, we’d had enough. The idea had been to be debt free. We threw in the towel and got a construction loan, hired a contractor, and ran out of money before it was quite done. The next 6 years found us finishing what we could, ignoring what we couldn’t and divorcing.
I got custody of the barn and a master bedroom that was an eyesore.
I had plans to finish the barn without the never-ending argument with a husband about how to do it cheaper. When I refinanced to pay off the ex, I took out some equity money. I also raided one of my retirement accounts.
My plan? A bedroom Martha Stewart would ooooh over.
It’s a long story, but I could not find the furniture I wanted, and I’m very fussy about furniture, at a price I was both willing to and able to pay. Fine furniture is expensive. I found the suite of my dreams in a magazine, tracked down a store that sold that brand online and had it priced. $26,000.
Um no.
So, I went looking again. But my heart was broken. What I’d found was perfect in every way and I had some odd requirements of size and pieces. But $26,000 is just crazy talk.
So. I’m driving home from work, and I drive by The North Carolina Furniture Outlet Store. I’d been in there looking and he had some brilliant furniture but nothing that would work. However, he’d told me over and again that if I found something elsewhere to bring it to him and he’d see what he could get it for.
Not hopeful, I presented him the furniture of my dreams. He pulled a big dusty showroom catalog off a shelf, flipped through it, turned it around so I could see, and said, “Is this it?”
I shrieked, “Yes!” So, he set to ciphering. Got out the calculator. And the little wheel of white paper spun like dervish. When he was done, he wrote a number on a legal pad, tucked the pencil behind his ear and said, “That includes, tax, delivery and set up. Take about 12 weeks.”
I took a breath. Looked at the numbers and gaped.
“Are you sure this is right?” I said. He looked at his page of calculations again and declared them solid.
$5600 for a king poster bed, an oversized dresser, nightstand, leather bench, vanity with matching leather bench, and a lingerie chest.
I closed my eyes. Clicked my heels together three times and whispered, “Let’s do it.”
$5600 was a good 2K more than I had budgeted. But…but…but I wasn’t finding anything other than particle board in my price range. I am a furniture snob.
The frenzy began. I had 12 weeks to find bed linens, draperies, a mattress, paint the master and the dressing room with it’s 20-foot ceilings and clean the carpet. I also had to hire a contractor to move a doorway so things would fit where I wanted them. I worked like a madwoman. The bed linens are another story, and they too were far more than I wanted to spend but they were just too perfect. And then there were the lamps and chaise. The whole thing was out of control, but I was going to have the bedroom of my dreams.
And I have for about seventeen years now. The comforter needs to be replaced. I’ve found another set in a icy blue that will be astonishing against the dark wood, and is highly impractical, luxurious, and I love it with an abiding passion. I believe these linens may be my 65th birthday present. If that’s the case, I need new draperies, new paint, new carpet, new lamps .and I will have to have the chaise reupholstered.
I can’t afford this.
There will be no clicking-of-my-heels-three-times-impulse-buy. Nope. Nor gonna do it. I have spoken.
The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you are 100% healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride. —
Pema Chodron.
Well. Damn.
Pema Chodron says that finally getting it together is death. So, why am I juggling 10,000 things and killing myself to keep them from falling? I don’t want to die.
She also says that the essence of life is that’s it’s challenging. Ah. I have a very lively life then. She closes with, “There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride.”
Hmmmm. I think I deserve a smooth ride. I don’t think the human condition should be one of struggles and challenges. I don’t think having one’s ducks in a row is death. Respectfully, Miss Pema, I disagree.
The essence of life is the quiet moments. The big ones – holding your newborn for the first time or looking into your partner’s eyes when you say I love you. The small ones – those all-too-brief moments on the zafu with the Tibetan prayer beads in hand where you can watch your thoughts like giant soap bubbles pop and dissipate or while sitting on the seashore admiring the enormity of all creation. The essence of life is the cup of coffee on the deck at sunrise in summertime. Sandaled feet, but sweatered arms – to keep the morning dew from chilling.
Sometimes life is sweet. And sometimes it is bitter. Further, sometimes it is Nirvana, and sometimes it is Hades. I don’t think The Creator breathed life into us to be constantly nauseated on a roller coaster of sweet and bitter. Afraid.
No, we are told again and again by all the great sages, Pema aside, Be ye not afraid.
The bitter will be there, yes that’s true. It’s our job to rise above it and smooth it out. To minimize the discord, to work against injustice, to celebrate peace, birthdays, and small fresh-sprouted seedlings. Life is a teeming of beginnings. Yes, and endings. But the endings too should be quiet and expansive — an ushering into the next.
When the body tenses, we lose our equanimity and forget our purpose by thrusting ourselves into fight or flight. When we relax, open up, we gain connection with the human condition and aren’t fighting against it, but working to maximize potential.
Smooth out those imperfections. Work for peace. Drink heavily from the chalice of life. We are here now and that is a great miracle and a tantalizing mystery. Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think. Assert yourself. You are a reborn star.
W. Va. Fur and Root 