Field work: on waking early
Good morning Lord, I know you love me as your beloved, a son or daughter. What are you up to today? I want to be a part of it.
Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and crotchety–
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light–
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.
upon waking —Prh: Isaiah 50:4-5 a song of God’s servant
The Lord God has given me an instructed tongue
to know the word that sustains the weary
He wakens me morning by morning,
wakens my ear to listen like one being taught.
The Lord God has opened my ears,
I have not been rebellious, I have not turned away.
Accompany the awakening day. a passage from a philosophy of walking by frederic gros. pg. 135-6 Thoreau, in all his work, wants to beleive in the mornings, or rather: it’s the morning that instils belief. you must always start at dawn when you walk, to accompany the awakening day. And in that undecided blue hour or so, you feel as it were the first unformed babblings of presence. walking in the morning confronts us with the poverty of our wishes, in the sense that wishing is the opposite of accompaniment… the facts of daytime emerge slowly. soon the sun will rise and everything will begin… to walk in the early morning is to understand the strength of natural beginnings. But Most of all, what he [thoreau] finds on some mornings, and in every spring, is the principle of renewal of the eternal…The sun is but a morning star.
My heart is steadfast, God;
I will sing, I will sing praises also with my soul.
Awake, harp and lyre; I will awaken the dawn! —-psalm 108: 1-2
Waking Up to God: by author barbara brown taylor; When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it!” —Genesis 28:16
The Bible I set out to learn and love rewarded me with another way of approaching God, a way that trusts the union of spirit and flesh as much as it trusts the world to be a place of encounter with God…. People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay.
According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.” How does one learn to see and hear such angels?
If there is a switch to flip, I have never found it. As with Jacob, most of my visions of the divine have happened while I was busy doing something else. I did nothing to make them happen…. I play no apparent part in their genesis. My only part is to decide how I will respond, since there is plenty I can do to make them go away, namely: 1) I can figure that I have had too much caffeine again; 2) I can remind myself that visions are not true in the same way that taxes and the evening news are true; or 3) I can return my attention to everything I need to get done today. These are only a few of the things I can do to talk myself out of living in the House of God.
Or I can set a little altar, in the world or in my heart. I can stop what I am doing long enough to see where I am, who I am there with, and how awesome the place is. I can flag one more gate to heaven—one more patch of ordinary earth with ladder marks on it—where the divine traffic is heavy when I notice it and even when I do not. I can see it for once, instead of walking right past it, maybe even setting a stone or saying a blessing before I move on to wherever I am due next.
Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish—separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
Where two worlds touch. The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
—Rumi
Why do people keep asking to see
God’s identity papers
when the darkness opening into morning
is more than enough? —-Mary Oliver, I Wake Close to Morning
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