Dawn Chorus

Up early today, with the back door open, listening to the Dawn Chorus as I wait for my coffee to brew.  I'm not naturally a morning person, but there are pleasures special to the pre-dawn hour that I can certainly appreciate.  The Chorus is one of them.  I love hearing the birds gradually wake up and the crickets wind down as the sky lightens.  I wonder what it's like to be a bird and get up every morning Singing:  just calling out your song to the world to greet the day.  That's how I'd like to be.  "Good morning World!"

I'm not, though.  Most mornings I'm groggy and disheveled and slow.  I'm utterly useless until I've had a cup of coffee. I am not, one might say, "getting the worm" at any hour before 8 a.m.  Though mostly my son and my dogs get me up by 7:30 at the latest.

This morning, however, is a different story, and I'm pleased for this opportunity to serve as audience to all my exuberantly wakeful avian neighbors.



It's amazing how many birds there are around us.  We barely notice them half the time, but when you start paying attention you notice:  they're everywhere. In every tree and shrub, bathing in puddles on the roadside, fluttering between the ceiling girders in Walmart, nesting under the overpasses, picking scraps out of the garbage, in a million different incarnations. How in the world is it possible for our world to have been blessed by these little miracles of evolution?  Flying dinosaurs, bright colored and bright eyed, flitting through our sky and we fail, most of the time, to be properly dumbfounded by them.  One look at their scaly little dinosaur feet and their reptilian ancestry is apparent.  They're a great example of what an extra few million years of evolution will get ya.  Wonder what humans will look like in 120 million years?  Oh, yeah, that's right, we'll have driven ourselves extinct long before then.

Well, best enjoy it while we're still on the planet, I suppose.

Kobi sleeps

I mentioned to someone a day or two ago that I wished I could be like my dog, Kobi.  Kobi wakes up joyfully every morning.  She sleeps under my covers, at the foot of my bed, and every morning she burrows her way up to my face and greets me as if I've been away for a week.  She's so glad to see me!  She's so happy to be alive!  And isn't it a beautiful, wonderful morning?  And then, when I ask "do you want to go outside?"  she is ecstatic!  "Oh Boy! Oh Boy!  Outside!  Oh Boy!  Let's go!"  And she runs to the door and eagerly waits for me to open it.  She races into the yard like kids to the icecream van.

When Kobi's not doing something important, like watching the front yard for intruders or playing with her sisters or chewing on something, she's asleep.  Just like that.  Yet when she's sleeping and the situation calls for her to be awake, she is instantly and enthusiastically awake. Bam!  No grogginess, no stumbling around  sleepily. She's awake.

How I would love to just shut my brain down and go to sleep when I'm not doing something!  How I would love the simple joy of living in the moment: Now. Now. Now!  Not endessly worrying over a thousand little troubles.  The word "worry" refers to a compulsive touching, as we do to a sore spot, and also to the vigorous shaking a dog gives a bone or toy or unfortunate prey animal.  It comes from the Old English word for "strangle."  Yeah.  That feels about right.

So I am practicing. Trying to live like Kobi, Here in the moment Now, with no part of my mind off doing its own thing. Trying to just Be who I Am. Celebrating Being, like those birds:  unabashedly, every morning:  "I'm Here!  I'm Here! I'm Here!