I am not a morning person

Just kidding. Sort of.  No, really.

I mean, I’m not the type who brings flowers and donuts to work every day singing Good Morning! To everyone I see before 8 a.m.

 

 

But if I have a decent sleep (4-6 hours), or if I smell strong coffee, or there’s the promise of good surf or a cool breeze in the mountains, a hint of snow or a full moon setting…. I’m in. Usually alone.

 

If I’ve dragged someone else into my adventures, I try to wake my friends with the smell of hot chocolate or pancakes as they stir in their tents, just to thank them. I like to spoil people.

There is a decisive moment, eyelids half open in uncertain twilight, weighing the pound for pound value of sliding one leg after the other out from under a stack of warm blankets, to follow a notion, out through the cold, wet curtain of morning, then comparing that rich potential to the alternative: blissfully sliding back into a decadent deep sleep, creeping in stages toward an unhurried cup of joe, while seated, at home.

To say there is no wrong answer makes you a morning person.

There are gifts: the color of light, the industrious rustling of birds for whom dawn is midday, the smell of melting frost on new grass. It is the stirring of things not human… a reminder that where we choose to direct our energy is how we choose to be at play in the dance of all things.

Eventually, after many dozen morning adventures, there is a transition from “rising with the sun” to “where would I like to be when the sun comes over the horizon?”

If you didn’t have an addictive personality before, this is how you create one. Not the predictable sense gratification addiction like chocolate, soft cheese, jacuzzis, porn, etc.  It’s more in the habit realm. Some addictions cause pain: coffee (hypertension, bad breath), shopping (bankruptcy), lifting weights, heroin.

And even “good” obsessions can lead to catastrophic extremes. Like the newborn endorphine junkie who starts with a 20-mile bike ride then works feverishly towards becoming the peleton at Giro d’Italia or Tour de France; face it: those guys look miserable.

Balance.

But I digress.

Much of the beauty of morning is that surround-sound of clicking, singing, melting, falling, foraging and landing on water that will later be shouted down by the buzz of engines. One merely has to be there to share in it. Attendance is required.

Here in the dawn, we discover our tribe. There they are: spinning by on bikes with headlamps like so many fireflies. On a trail I look for signs of footprints crunching through frosted leaves. Sometimes I hear a rhythmic splash followed by a faded silhouette that never quite becomes anything more before it recedes into fog. We begin to believe in totems; the animal spirit that greets you first that day. A sea lion, Cooper’s hawk, a crow, an osprey, raccoon, pelican.

On New Year’s morning 2013 it was a pair of dolphins just outside the surf line after my human companions had gone in other directions.

Rachel Carson said to an audience, after writing The Sea Around Us, and long before Silent Spring: “I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.”