Morning

5:20 a.m.: Out back in my prayer shack, the heavens transform from their slate-toned palette to the crimson dawn. It is here in this certain silence that I walk in the dreamtime, as I refer to it. You know, those first moments of awakening when the senses are dull and the mind is quiet. So I try to hold onto that sleepmind and, just like the sky itself, I open myself to each day at a pace that eases me into the world around.

I guess the experts would call it Zen mind or somethin’ like it. I just know it as a sense of space where the sounds around me are mainly the natural world before the noise debris of the day-to-day rises in all its busyness. And while I live alone, I leave the house with coffee in hand and head aroun’ back to a place to get away from me, if ya follow. A place sorta similar, I guess you could say, to what Thomas Merton spoke about when he entered the monastic world: “Within these four walls I found my freedom.”

It is the removing of oneself from distractions, visual or other. You know, stuff like accumulating mail or dishes in the sink and the like. These things do get taken care of time-to-time, but only when I need another sort of mind-quieting session around lunch time.

I recently had screens made for the windows in my shack, for ‘tis mosquito season. Large windows in fact, aligned with the compass east/west at winter solstice. Large windows that were once installed at the local lumber yard prior to the building’s renovation. They have found new life in my backyard.

The reason I mention screens is that a number of years back, in an architectural salvage place, I spotted a large set of screens that came from a home in the Thousand Islands. What appealed to me was the idea that the screen material was copper. Copper that seemed to have soaked up the patina of decades spent along the St. Lawrence River. Copper just like the hues of the pre-dawn skies beyond my window at this very moment. You know, the mood of tarnished aging sun that leans over the horizon and spreads its wings to dance, Zorbalike across the restless fields of ripened grain. Copper screens are the kind of thing I like to do, just because. Just because it’s possible; just because it is like an untamed canvas; just because my curiosity wants to know more about it.

The red squirrels are now loud with chatter. I spot them in a hell-bent chase through the treetops of the nearby Manitoba maples. And now, the call of the blue jay: the song of the cardinal. Keeping my bird feeders topped up has brought delight in past months, parades of songbirds I have seldom seen down here by Slab Creek.

So now, the day calls and I will leave my backyard sanctuary to head into the awaiting day. I’ll carry in my pocket the salve of these moments here alone, to spend through the day to help keep me on track. To remind me of the truth of mornings and time spent in the early moments of each new day.