More than a year of working at home means not rushing out of bed in the morning. What luxury! I open my eyes in the early light and often stay long enough to watch the blue hour turn to day.
I Wake to Sleep has long been a favourite poem because it captures that in-between world so well.
In listening to Jon Kabat Zin today, he was encouraging the practice of a slow and conscious awakening to carry us into the day. No longer a guilty pleasure to linger....
Searching for a graphic on the blue hour, I see one of my favourite sites, Brain Pickings, has posted The Blue Hour, a book with truly glorious illustrations on this illusive colour.
And then the site offered me this poem, perfectly random. A day of serendipity.
ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH
by Rebecca Elson
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
