Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Falling Awake

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.




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