on mornings

lingering in the liminal

The birdsong twitters this week, in the mornings in the cedar tree outside the bedroom window, where the slant of light also changes. This is a precious noticing. Pretty much around Imbolc, when we crossed the thin line to the wide space between winter and spring, I felt life return. The breath in my lungs the air on my face your hand in mine. I, too, have been singing. On zooms, in churches, on the street. I no longer fear I will never carry a tune - that doesn’t feel like the important part anymore.

The dawn chorus is in fact a proclamation: here I am here I am here I am I am I am. I made it through the night.

And the response: here we are we are we are, we are surviving the dark.

And may it be so, I claim my mornings.

I listen to the birds while I am still in bed and I keep my eyes shut as long as I can, not pressed tight but kissing lashes to lashes, the mineral of sleep in their corners, the promise of daylight. I’m trying to remember how to dream, or remember how to remember my dreams, or dream the answer of how to remember. However you want to put it, I’m intent on the lingering.

This dwelling space of half awake is holy. A sensorial language, lucid - precarious. I am in two worlds, maybe more: a mountain side, my mother’s kitchen, someone else’s mother’s kitchen, I ask myself, when I can hear the birdsong, when I know what room I’m in, what’s important today? And I start to make a list, gather the tenets of a Tuesday and then I’m flying, I’m falling, I’m figuring it out and forgetting it again. I trace my way back through as many dreams as I can remember, before they slip away.

A resting body remembers that a dreaming mind is ungovernable. *

The liminal is a space of possibility and creativity, both resting and enlivened, I drop tiny anchors into my heart and feel for its flutter, a ripple. There is a day that wants to be made. My hands find my belly. It is five minutes or five hours, or five years, time breaks, I can’t quite tell. It harkens back to the years I taught restorative yoga, watching bodies rest in dark rooms, swaddling adult humans in blankets, acts of what I didn’t see then as maternal care. Chronically under-rested at the time I found the dreamscape not in the middle hours, but the cracks in between, twenty minute practices of laying my body down, the energetic gesture - this limb splayed, this limb tucked - I felt myself free from myself.

There are words for this liminal space, but they feel irreverent. Hypnagogic, the space in between being awake and being asleep, and hypnopompic, the space between being asleep and being awake, and these visions of liberation, call them kindly these little dreamlets instead “hallucinations”. And what of it, when we are neither waking nor sleeping nor sleeping nor waking but some magical third thing all its own?

A resting body remembers that a dreaming mind is ungovernable.

A few years ago, I read Stephen Levine’s One Year to Live and still think about his take on what he calls the Great American Death Mantra. He supposes that Americans are so averse to thinking about death that they don’t consider the way they would like to die, and so, there is no offering, no prayer, built into our neural pathways, no muscle memory, sort of speak, and instead, when met with demise, we default to the panicked thought of “Oh Shit.” And this is our last gasp thanks to the life we’ve lived and the first welcome to the whatever after. Oh Shit. The Great American Death Mantra. Oh Shit. So in resting, where we are neither wakeful or asleep, where we are experiencing this little death, this little birth, I practice how I want to die and how I want to be born. Of course, the ouroboros pierces the tail at dawn.

Oh Shit.

I experiment with changing the inflection. Oh Shit. Oh, Shit. Oh Shit! It could be an expression of awe, a marvel, a curse, an acquiesce. A statement on the current regimes. Offered intentionally, I can make a case for Oh Shit. But ultimately, I want a different tone on my tongue. Oprah, supposedly wakes every morning and says, “Thank You”. Pema Chodron, I’ve heard, offers an “I wonder what will happen today?”. I have adopted and used them both. My favorite prayers: Thank you. I wonder what will happen? Lately, it’s been a love note: I love you. Good Morning. Here I am here I am here I am I am I am. I made it through the night.

Here we are we are we are, we are surviving the dark.

I like to do this part with my eyes still closed. When I do open them, I am also trying something novel and new and completely unprecedented where I look at five things before I look at my phone. This was after one night, when falling asleep, I had visions (hallucinations?) of scrolling. Knowing this is not the dream I am made to dream, I make an adjustment, in hopes for a softer entrance back into the land of living things.

1. the rainbows on the wall, this one orange and aqua (does every rainbow count as a separate thing?)

2. the plant on the bookshelf, tendrils almost ready to bloom. jasmine, one of my favorite scents, I think of the climbing walls of white flowers where I grew up

3. the willow star above the window, I remember last winter, walking through the valley, weaving branches, keep weaving

4. the photo on the dresser, L leaning back into my arms

5. the arched shape of the small hanging altar, crafted by loving hands

The days are both so short and so fast. I want to reach into the corners. Fill the space and then hold it open.

To make this all possible, I’ve asked to be left alone in bed more. My early-riser wife has her own morning routine: coffee, a candle, a card, her morning pages. Read her book, check in on the news. Not always in the same order. Generously, she’s offered to take this to the kitchen island and some mornings, I hear her gather herself and I’m not pretending to sleep per se, let’s call it preserving my passage. She is lovingly obliging when I ask not to be spoken to until I emerge from our room, having touched the corners of my day and wiggled my way back into my body.

Here I am here I am here I am I am I am. I made it through the night.

She kisses me in the kitchen: here we are we are we are, we are surviving the dark.

I’m sure I could craft a morning practice that waxed until noon, but It’s warm enough to open the door, there is a soft wind in the pine trees. I wash my face. Pour a glass of water.

Thank you.

I pause.

I wonder what will happen today?

Sending love to wherever you are.

xx

What are your mornings like?

* A resting body remembers that a dreaming mind is ungovernable. is a phrase Cass and I crafted together for our recent evening at Abide, Dream in Between.