The Stillness Of The Morning

Quiet.

I love the safety of an early morning. Morning moves slowly. In early hours there is time for contemplation, for listening, for the sorting of ones life into manageable tasks. In the morning I am not yet behind, not racing or juggling or fighting traffic and customer service or negotiating relationships. In the morning each thing is presented singularly, in its own time. Now coffee, now dishes, now the sound of the men collecting trash, now the blue jays knocking at the window. There is is time, and hope, and possibility inside the blue light of a morning, a gathering of will. 

There is comfort in a morning. As a child, I was always the first to rise. A good girl, I would quietly crawl from the covers to roam the house, feed the cat, and bring in my fathers paper. When he got up, half-lidded, sniffing for his coffee, interested in the news of the day, gearing up for a long day of work, he would take me by the hand and we would stand together at the picture window to watch the sunrise. From our perch on the hill, looking east, it was as if the whole world was bathed in soft pink sheets of promised light. My fathers hand was warm and soft.

This morning, I watched the sky take on the light from my own little perch on a hill, facing west. I closed my eyes, and felt my hand slip into my fathers. For a moment, my world was simple, love, gratitude, memory. And then, with a breath and a smile, I opened my eyes.

Start the day. 

Simple Things

Morning.

Fall brings with it such a hustling and bustling that the simple things in life can slip right through our fingers. Why should we stop to smell the newly rain-scrubbed air or savor the warming of our hands wrapped around a cup of tea when there are football games, little leagues, school projects and the impending doom of holiday shopping, decorating and entertaining to attend to? 

This week, I reject both hustle and bustle, regardless of deadlines and obligations. Instead, I choose to whittle out space to savor the season, the changing of the leaves, the sound of rain against the roof, and early night fall. Most of this time is carved from the earliest parts of mornings. Some simple morning gratitudes:

Piano practice.

Soggy mushroom hunts.

Pumpkins roasting in the oven.

Leaf prints, stained into the sidewalk.

The filling of the root cellar.

Coffee by the fire.

Garden beds, neatly turned for winter.

Someone's Got to Dig it.

Hole.

Last year the deer ate every flower and hopeful bud in the garden. This year, I scoured books and garden centers for every deer resistant flower I could find and planted them, as bulbs, in hopeful anticipation of the spring bloom. Yesterday, I came home to find that the squirrels, eager for a lightening of their fall work load, had emptied every hole, cast aside my precious bulbs, and replaced them with hazelnuts. I suppose someone has to dig the hole.

I Am Not A Mother,

But.

I am not a mother but,

I am a teacher, mentor, caretaker and friend.

I am the babysitter, nanny, and perpetual auntie.

I am a helper to mothers. 

I have walked the floor with them until you get home, helped them with their homework, gone to their soccer games, and put them to bed when they were young.

When they grew up, I took them to coffee, reminded them to have dinner with you, and help them put you into context.

I am not a mother, but,

I have dedicated a life to the raising of other peoples children.

I am not a mother, but,

I am one of the first believers in your child.

I will be among the first to challenge them; a person for whom they will rise to any bar they set.

I will help them to shine on their own.

I am not a mother but,

before you speak,

consider.

There is a role in this world for the helper of mothers, the caretakers of children, 

and forces beyond our control. 

Geology Confidential I

Rocks.

You can tell a lot about a person, or a geologist anyway, by the rocks they keep. You can find them, usually cluttering shelves and porches, collecting dust and spider webs, or used as book ends, garden bed borders and paperweights throughout the house. There is, no doubt, more of them in boxes, drawers and closets, tucked away, and carried from house to house. They serve as true a record of the person, the ground that they have walked over, their work and passions, as they do of orogenies, ancient sea floors and catastrophic eruptions. A sample:

Thousands of bags of pumice, weighed, wrapped in wax, labeled in green permanent marker.

A volcanic bomb, fourteen pounds, hiked out of the Arizona volcanic field cradled in my arms.

Iron-rich basalt, encased in calcite and weathered to a bright pink. Hauled home from Costa Rica by a friend.

Sandwich bag, filled with black primordial ooze, gifted from a friend visiting the tar pits.

Small bottle of ash from the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

Geodes, 22, gifted from a student's grandfather's collection after he passed away.

Salt block, hounded in Nevada, evaporated to less than half it's original size in the Oregon humidity.

Obsidian, with flow lines, from the Newberry flows.

Fossiliferous limestone, collected in Montana, that has graced the front porch of every house I've lived in since 2001.

Hardened clay, formed into a cube during a long day of drilling.

Dust, from a thousand day hikes and field areas, caked into the seams of a too-old day pack.