Morning

Every morning, as the sunlight rises in our window out of the night, we rise into waking from the sleeping unconscious. The landscape is washed in color from new light; the air is cool and clean in our nostrils. Our limbs and mind are slowly rising, renewed from the previous day. The cycles of the day come in seasons - morning’s spring thawing from night’s long winter.

There is something unique in the sensation of waking. Our ethereal and corporal halves are reunited in a moment; the mind is called from its wandering back into the physical. As we steep in the warmth between the mattress and sheets, the traces of our dreams fade, slipping like water running off of a glass sphere. Our mind is left blank, completely cleansed for a split second as we re-enter our waking lives. We begin as a pure slate to be sculpted for the new day. Our heads as well as our limbs are slow and more moldable in the early hours. Muscles and sinew are slumberous but light, gradually thawing, refreshed from yesterdays ennui.

Something in the quality of light in the morning is distinctive from the rest of the day. It is more pure and clear than the afternoon, when it begins to yellow with age. The spectrum of color seems wider than at any other time of day, a vivid kaleidoscope. The moisture of the dew covers everything, almost radiating, blurring together in morning’s palate. Dawn creeps slowly over the sky line in the early hours; beginning to glow faintly with a red aura outlining the edges of vision, as if the entire curvature of the horizon were ignited at a point just out of sight. The sun rises like a burning emblem of the day against the streaming sky, waking color as it sweeps into view. The growing light cascades through our windows, climbing like wild ivy up our walls, swaying with liquid quality as we rise.

Sound is similarly effected during this hour; its waves seeming to carry differently in the brisk air. The tones are clearer and more piercing; noise seems to rip through the quiet in precise melodic strokes when the dead air is imposed upon. A still quiet hangs over everything like an atmospheric pressure; walking outside at this hour the noise is strangely hushed. From the middle of the empty street the faint approach of a cars motor can be heard from beyond the horizon line; all the slight noises of the waking world combine into a soft hum, a yawning silence permeating auroras still life.

Vitality in general seems to be heightened in the early hours. Inhalation is deeper and lighter, as if not only the lungs but entire frame breathed and coursed with air; pulsing reverberation through the innermost cavities. The air is cool and vibrant, as if the sky were being inhaled for the first time, un-recycled. Breakfast is an inevitable event of the A.M., after fasting for nearly ten hours we are in want of food. Eating seems less dull and ritualistic and more necessary and refreshing. We are empty and must consume to revitalize ourselves. The smell of tea wafts with steam in the morning air, fogging windowpanes above the kitchen sink; morning mulls in simplicity and pathos, the essential reincarnation of the earth in its axis.