This morning when I woke up, I lingered in bed much longer than usual. Reacquainting myself with my fingers, my hands, my feet and legs. Reintroducing myself to myself, to the thoughts and feelings that I will gather together like feathers into a pillowcase to recreate today’s version of me. It was an act of artistry so habitual and yet so astonishing it’s a wonder I ever write or speak about anything else. To reconstruct myself morning after morning, moment after moment, into this relatively coherent, albeit deeply flawed, “person” is a momentous, primordial act, on which every other one of my acts of creation depends. How could I possibly rush past it, or overlook it, as I am inclined to do most mornings when the demanding cat or lure of coffee yanks me unceremoniously into the world?
Most days I begin with an apparently automatic sense that I must perform all sorts of this-n-thats simply to justify my basic right to exist, to even take up space and air, let alone water, food, or the affirmation of other people. On a normal day, my inclination is to get down to business, earning my keep as a householder, a citizen, an intellectual producer. I do the laundry, sweep the leaves from the porch, put the finishing touches on an essay I will toss into the ether like a message in a leaky bottle. On many normal days, I am motivated by lack, a baseline of anxiety so familiar I barely notice, let alone question it: I must do more, be better. I must dance faster and run farther. I must find a better word, a much better string of words than this one, to express what, supposedly, I have a responsibility to say.
But there are some special mornings, mornings of grace, when I just know even before leaving my bed. When I do not have to meditate or write my way into understanding that the sheer fact of re-becoming some version of me is an opportunity so breathtaking that anything else I could ever do would shrink beside it. The fact that I am stumbling and erring on a daily basis is not the point. That I so often move like a gangly colt when I mean to be floating is not the point. That my stupidity causes pain to another and that his clumsiness causes pain to me. Well, none of this is the point, not yet, not before we leave our beds and step back into ourselves. Not when the sheer miracle of being aware that I am—that you are—radiates all around like the red glow of a toaster oven.
When I am in sync with the thrumming aliveness of the plenum from which I reorganize myself and re-become, there is no question of analysis or adjustment or forgiveness. Such assessments and worries simply cannot gain traction, or really even be seen, through eyes that have just been born into awareness. And then are born again and again, into the next moment and the next. Through such unschooled eyes, no wrong has yet been done, no mistake made, not by me nor to me. In such moments of rebirth, I would, if I could, embrace anyone within reach from the sheer joy of recreating ourselves before one another’s eyes. Eyes of another that, amazingly, I can also see seeing me. Although this is not something that could ever be properly written, I cannot help but wonder: How could anything matter more than these miraculously mundane self-rebirths we perform, separately and together, again and again and again?
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