In the mornings, just before the sun wakes and the sky seems dirtied by darkness and the moon (sometimes) shines as brightly as it would at midnight right through the long upstairs bedroom window and I almost mistake it for the sun but then I’m not quite that naïve, I awake. It is seven in the morning, and the world seems paralyzed with transition. Because the dawn never breaks slowly, never with self-awareness, but always suddenly without anyone realizing that it happened and then the sky is no longer dirtied but white and pure and things are real again because they are concrete. It is day now; possibilities become realities. But the time in between, when the world seems cloaked in unawareness that it is changing, when no one else seems to be awake and the loneliness of the hour feels welcome (more like solitude), I am happiest. I never recognized the beauty of this time before I moved to the middle of the woods. During these minutes, I have purpose. My job is to dress, to expel cold, to brew coffee, to listen to the events that may have passed while I was sleeping or not listening. To hear Donald Trump’s voice scare me from the radio (because somehow he has gained the pleasure of greeting me every morning these days). But his voice never really touches me until the daytime blooms fully. It’s as if dawn protects me from anything that isn’t simple or logical. It gives me a place to hide, to forget, to remember. A bit like the place I am living now, this tiny community of quiet escape, where I can turn off the radio and pretend like nothing matters but the problems right in front of me, which always seem to have solutions that are obvious and easily stricken from my to do list:
How to stir the pot, to use the blessings that life has bestowed to enact positive change, from the middle of the woods? How to live a life that embodies both lists, both dawn and day and nighttime too, to not fall into a pattern of escapism and loosen the reins on determined, shape-shifting existence? These are the things that trouble me these days. I just finished Purity by Jonathon Franzen. Witty and challenging yet utterly traditional in format, it seems to suggest we find a way to wipe the Earth clean, to start over fresh, as if we could or would, if given the chance. But with its ending, it resolves such an idea’s impossibility and recognizes the necessity of complexity and strife; the need for yesterday to mix with tomorrow and for today to travel back and forth between the two while adding a unique token of presentness. To accept the bad with the good and the ugliness with the beauty. To do this may be the only way to find peace, to learn how to live a life of responsible simplicity without running away from the world altogether. To remember how to breathe. Another lesson from the wild, I would say. That we are small and we can only use our smallness to push forward when we remember the quiet importance and expectancy of dawn and keep it with us through the day that follows.
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Meet ErinJournalist, adventurer, writer, musician, dancer, linguist, and cook, ready to tell you about her ridiculous attempts to live in the Alaskan wilderness without running water and live beyond the woods Archives
April 2016
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