Every morning at twenty-five after six, two mourning doves outside my window begin singing to each other. When I am sitting alone, sipping my coffee, I hear them begin cooing as the first rays of the sun clear the two oak trees across the street. Some people find the call of the mourning dove sorrowful, perhaps because its low and tender tone.
I am just waking up myself, allowing my thoughts from the night to pivot into those of the new day. The waking hour is one that adjusts slowly to a new field of vision, and doves come in gently. Their long silences between calls grant each other a chance for details to come into focus, and for their deeper dialogue to be flushed out under my azaleas. These birds do not come fully out of their shadows until they know where the light is; nor do they sing until the night dew is dusted off their feathers by the soft blue light along the horizon. The pair of doves I hear are not going into the new day; the day is coming into them.
When I hear the doves cooing, I think of a long horizontal line of windows adorning an old house I used to live in. I rarely see those kinds of translucent windows in houses anymore. They were not windows, really but thick glass bricks that allowed light in – energy portals – ideal for the slow introduction of sunlight into my childhood bedroom. The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson would have loved them. He well understood the importance of a modest start to each new day when he advised us to “begin it well and serenely, with too high a hope to be encumbered” by our old nonsense.
There are no other seconds like the ones we invite in first to our mornings. They get the front row seats, shape our consciousness, and form the mortar that holds everything together for the rest of the day. Synapses are firing, blood is moving upstream to soak our brains in thought, and our heart is picking up the pace. We can think about what we must get done, but we will miss a chance to lie still and let a prayer of hope and thanksgiving re-blanket us. We can worry about the porch light we left on, but another Light is more important.
Should I slug down my coffee? Download a shower? I fly out of our house like it’s the last call for Flight 758, now boarding for the end of the driveway. I have done that many times, only to make a trip back inside to grab the thankfulness I left at the door. These seconds we allow ourselves to wake up can pass us in slow motion. They can allow time to say, “hallowed be thy name” and make our thoughts count for the rest of our day. If there was ever a time to do it, the first five minutes when the doves are cooing is the time.
I read once where there is no progression without regression. It is true. What we think of as forward progression is merely a mask for quickness, or impatience. We may have skipped the small steps, like the bits of shame or rudeness or impatience that we dropped like litter along our hurry-up- and-wait path. Now we must go back and pick those pieces up.
I used to give a test to my students which had twenty complicated steps. They were not difficult steps, just complicated. It was a test that was titled, “Following Directions.” Did you ever take that test? The first step said READ EVERYTHING BEFORE DOING ANYTHING, but no one ever did. I watched my determined students frantically write, calculate, and scribble. Their foreheads were furrowed, their heads were bent hard. Precious seconds ticked away, and the more they hurried, the more involved the steps seem to get.
“TIME!” I called out.
“How many steps did you get done?” Student Fast asked Student Quick.
“I got down to twelve but couldn’t figure out the anagram in the word ‘signature.’”
That was indeed a true sign. At the bottom of the test, the last step read:
Now that you have read everything, sign your name at the top, turn your paper over and wait patiently for further directions from the teacher.
Each day we are given this test. We are tempted to skip over the first step. But within it are the inspirations of morning. That first step is the one still in its pajamas. It is loose, relaxed and navigable and help us reconcile our insurmountable worries.
These are the times when a sleepy child might crawl up on your lap to be warm because your calm and peace made you available. You look comfortable, and a child recognizes that kind of easiness. A child knows that your heart is a place of shelter.
“Do you have a heart?” they may ask, as they climb into your big arms.
“Yes, I do. It’s right here,” but they have already gone back to sleep. They have been following their heart and read everything before doing anything, and they can read you like a book. They went back, regressed, and got quiet again as if they were still in bed. They had one more dream, an important one they wanted to see again. It was a rerun with Mickey and forts and Candy Land game pieces scattered over the rug and under the couch.
There are no quieter seconds like the first ones we invite in each day. They are the song of the mourning doves. Many times, I have made the mistake of beginning a day too loud and sacrificed a rare time that only comes when silence is hanging thick, and the world has not yet pushed to the front of the line. I have started a load of laundry or made a list of tasks I have no intention of completing. I have passed up the Good Book that is open and waiting for me, that great book with all the wonderful kindneSs and pAtience and loVe and HonEsty and wisDom. I walk by that beauty and choose instead to go outside to straighten out my trash bins I think are positioned at odd angles.
I have forgotten about the scarcity of quiet, about the cooing of doves. I stand looking up and down the street, perilously close to the curb, as if challenging someone else to be up this early. It is only five-thirty. Has the trash guy has come yet? I walk out into the middle of the street so that I can see farther down the street. Maybe the trash guy is down there, and then, not seeing him, I suddenly remember one time when the trash wasn’t picked up until long after lunch. Perhaps the trash man is not going to come at all today. Maybe he has taken a personal day to stay at home and binge watch Mortal Combat. Maybe…
Slumping slightly, looking ridiculous in my pj’s, I began to worry that our trash will be hauled off by some irresponsible noodnik, some substitute trash person. He’s probably the regular one’s brother-in-law, and probably only acquired the job through some kind of metropolitan nepotism. I am thinking now that I’m not liking him already and imagine he’s not going to put my trash bins back in the right place. He is not the real trash guy. He is the BROTHER-IN-LAW, for Pete’s sake.
When he arrives to pick up the trash at my house this morning, he will be twenty-five feet up in the air in his cab looking down at me while eating a McBacon-egg-and-cheese-biscuit that he thought he could run in and grab while his truck was picking up the McDonald’s dumpster. He will be finishing off his biscuit when the automatic arms of his trash truck come down to brutally clutch my trash bin. I will see him throw back his head and toss the last bite down his throat while the trash bin slams into my yard and shatters a sprinkler head on my irrigation system.
This is the fret and anxiety that Emerson warned us to avoid. It is the noise that trash talks its way into our thoughts and morphs into the urgency. Then it becomes the too-much-salt in a soup we cannot remove.
It is said that the ancient aborigines were so in tune with their environment that their feet could pick up the vibrations of an animal under the sand. We have the opportunity every day to be in tune with the vibrations of the morning and hear a familiar call of what is right outside our doors. It may be a truth we have been waiting for, or it may be the cooing of a pair of doves. Their world is spinning like ours, but they are quietly listening to the morning.