Between Dreams and Duty
Literature is important, but only if you make time for it.
Somewhere around 5 am the husky rises from the bathroom floor where he sleeps in with his head wrapped around the cool porcelain toilet, shakes off slumber, walks into my bedroom, collapses onto the floor, and sighs. This is his sometimes subtle/sometimes not so subtle signal that he is ready to get up.
I, his “master”, still don’t enjoy getting up before the sun, but here in Arizona one does so out of necessity. When the days stretch into the 100’s for months on end and it’s often above 90 well before 8 am, beating the sun becomes a way of life.
But it is not summer, and we are in the long fall leading to a very short, intense winter before the heat cycle begins again.
I snooze for another 30 minutes phasing in and out of intense dreams, then roll over, say a prayer for the day ahead, and plant my feet on the floor.
The husky is already at the back door.
To have the morning I want, the barrier to entry must be low. The coffee should be ready to brew, the toiletries need to stand in attention on the shelf in the order I need them, the kindle should be on its charger or my book on the counter by the back door with my reading glasses neatly folded on top.
If I have navigated these treacherous and vital first minutes successfully, by the time the coffee is made the husky is napping outside and I sit the french press on the table, walk over to give the husky a belly rub, stretch and check the status of the sun, then walk back to my patio table, put on my glasses, and sit down to read. If I am lucky, I have exactly 55 minutes of uninterrupted time to do dedicate to this most sacred of tasks. I must be vigilant if I am to preserve the engagement with that I hold most dear.
There are some who wake from sleep heavily medicated, in rooms with blackout curtains, to the metallic alarm screeching out the start of the day like a sadistic foreman on a production line. They hit snooze several times before eventually waking up enough to reach for their phones and begin the endless death scroll of narcissism, simulacra, and despair that will consume much of their day. There’s no need for judgement day when these folks die. They’re not bound for hell; they are already living it.
Morning is a sacred time, a time between the realm of dreams and the obligations of our hectic, capitalist lives. We do not milk the cows, we do not listen to the call of the rooster, we do not watch deer graze in the field. We do not sip coffee in a rocking chair on the front porch and welcome the sun to its daily chores.
None of the farmers I have known wake up to an alarm clock, and if I am living correctly neither will I.
By 6:10 I am deep into the world of the book I am reading. Today it happens to be the autobiography of poet and fiction writer Jim Harrison, most famously known for his novella Legends of the Fall because it was the best movie adapted from his work. But Jim wrote many great works, and working through them is my current literary project. In this early hours, his phrases zing with life:
“The natural world would always be there to save me from suffocating in my human problems.”
“Educated circles are shot through with a fungoid self-righteousness about matters with which they haven’t had a filament of experience.”
These are not particularly his best quotes, just a random sampling I encounter this morning.
I am in the flow and the ebb of words, someone else’s understanding of life, someone else’s inner monologue. On a good morning, I might even be inspired to grab my pen and notebook and sacrifice some minutes of reading to get my own thoughts down on the page, but I have to weigh whether the thoughts in my head are worth sacrificing my sacred reading time for. A writer knows there is never a guarantee that a line will go anywhere.
No essay will express the brilliant ideas in your head that you sat down to capture. You will have to wait for another time to lament the decline of reading in America—tying it to all sorts of other social ills. You wait for another time to try to respond artfully to the inspiration you take from the autobiography you’re reading. You’ll even fail to capture the thrill of the Phoenix sun rising through a prism of cloud layer. You will find, after some many minutes of writing, that all you’ve managed to do is capture this little slice of your morning routine and hope that you’ve conveyed how important it is to a sense of living to find a love of literature within yourself and to set about the arduous work of securing the time to read and understand it.
Whatever your writing might or might not convey doesn’t matter now. It is 6:55 am and time to leave the work that sustains you to do the work society mandates you do to make a living.
It would be intolerable without the sanctuary you have made of your morning.