Sep 19 2006
Wee Small Hours Of The Morning
I love the quiet dark hours of the early morning. I love running past the silent sleeping houses when the light is strangely flat and I have the world all to myself. I hear a distant susurration that I know is traffic, but I imagine it to be the ocean surf. I feel as if the world was dreaming and I’m its lucid dreamer. Sometimes I’ll encounter another runner and we smile because we are sharing communion.
It doesn’t matter where I am or what time of year it is – warm, humid, cold, foggy, wet … those hours are magic. The world feels so still, yet I can feel its vibrant heartbeat.
Now more than ever, the world is too much with us, with me. I need my quiet time, my moments of solitude.
In this round-the-clock-gotta-stay-connected-productivity-focused world, those moments of quiet, of stillness, of being are becoming few.
I realize that many people find my early morning walks a bit odd. That’s OK. While they slumber, I can dream.
I could not agree more. My favorite time of the day is the early morning hours.
As the sunrises, it is a start, nothing good or bad has happened, your thoughts are truly your own, nothing is happening to influence your considerations, it under your control, and can reveal a lot about who you are and what is important to you.
I agree there are some noises, but they are just start up noises, and nothing is directed at you.
It is a time of peace, my mind is rested, and as sharp as my mind can get. I like to just sit, no music, no tv, I am doing nothing, it only me and my thoughts. It can be very revealing so you have to be ready for it, but my inner self is a place that I cherish, and where I learn, feel, and understand.
Just a comment, I enjoy the site, and look forward to future entries.
Kkewl: yes, it is a time of peace. In those early morning hours, I feel one with the universe. I try to meditate first thing in the morning and if I manage to fit it in, I feel that I started my day off right. I know what people mean when they say they feel ‘centered’.
During the day I usually have some music playing – headphones on, drowning out the world. I know what you mean about just sitting, no music, no TV. Silence can be so restful.
That is also one of the strangest times of day. They say before the invention of artificial light that people used to have two sleep cycles during the darkness. One from early evening til around midnight, other from midnight to dawn, with a period of wakefulness in the middle. Imagine what people did as they were looking out into total blackness of an unilluminated landscape, or the light haze of a moonlight evening. Nowadays, people think nothing of staying up until 4 or 5 hours past sunset, or getting up before dawn. Used to be very difficult to accomplish anything without a source of light so you had your set work period during the day and then rest at night. Amazing how much has changed in the last 150 years compared with the previous 100’s of generations of human existence…
Beautifully expressed! I’ve read that all the additional hours of artificial light girls have had has affected their reproductive cycle – that is, they mature earlier. That’s why we hear about girls reaching puberty at some unusually young age like 10. Is too much light the reason? Who knows. But that’s one reason that’s posited.
It’s amazing how much light a city will give off. When I’ve gone camping (now a thing of the past as I am a total hedonist when it comes to mattresses and hot showers) I was incredulous at how little I could see at night. I could barely see beyond the campfire or the lantern.