Prevernal

Thanks to my backdoor neighbor Suzan Windnagel for this beautiful pre - Spring sunrise view, including the back of my garage and house! Look closely and you can see our little pink Christmas / Valentine / Easter tree!

A "cold and mercurial morning . . . "
I think this poem, that I discovered in Wayne Muller's Sabbath might explain why I like to stay up as late as possible instead of going to bed:

Another Loss to Stop For

Against such cold and mercurial mornings,
watch the wind whirl one leaf
across the landscape,
then, in a breath, let it go.
The color in the opaque sky
seems almost not to exist.

Put on a wool sweater.
Wander in the leaves,
underneath healthy elms.
Hold your child in your arms.

After the dishes are washed,
a kiss still warm at your neck,
put down your pen. Turn out the light.

I know how difficult it is,
always balancing and weighing,
it takes years and many transformations;
and always another loss to stop for,
to send you backwards.

Why do you worry so,
when none of us is spared?

~ by Jill Bialosky
American poet, book editor, and novelist

As for being spared:

"We don't receive wisdom;
we must discover it for ourselves
after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us."
Marcel Proust

"There's no basement in the Alamo.
It's not something they teach you in school.
It's one of those things you have to find out for yourself."
Pee Wee Herman

Having It All

Look: not one but two!
First crocus sighting of the season!
[Warmer in Kansas than Indiana!]

from the essay, "Bakeries"
by Delia Ephron
found in her book Sister Mother Husband Dog
To me, having it all — if one wants to define it at all — is the magical time when what you want and what you have match up. Like an eclipse. A total eclipse is when the moon is at its perigee, the earth is at its greatest distance from the sun, and when the sun is observed near zenith. I have no idea what that means. I got the description off a science Web site, but one thing is clear: it’s rare. This eclipse never lasts more than seven minutes and 31 seconds.

Personally, I believe having it all can last longer than that. It might be a fleeting moment — drinking a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning when the light is especially bright. It might also be a few undisturbed hours with a novel I’m in love with, a three-hour lunch with my best friend, reading “Goodnight Moon” to a child, watching a Nadal-Federer match. Having it all definitely involves an ability to seize the moment, especially when it comes to sports. It can be eating in bed when you’re living on your own for the first time or the first weeks of a new job when everything is new, uncertain and a bit scary. It’s when all your senses are engaged. It’s when you feel at peace with someone you love. And that isn’t often. Loving someone and being at peace with him (or her) are two different things. Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgment. It’s when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind. (p 79)

Not particularly American, unquantifiable, unidentifiable, different for everyone, but you know it when you have it. (pp 151 - 52; see also p 13)

And this . . .
from the essay "Hurtling Toward the Eschaton"
by Wayne Muller
found in his book Sabbath:
Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives
A Sabbath Challenge to the theology of progress: But we must ask this question: What if we are not going anywhere? What if we are simply living and growing within an ever - deepening cycle of rhythms, perhaps getting wiser, perhaps learning to be kind, and hopefully passing whatever we have learned to our children? What if our life, roughhewn from the stuff of creation, orbits around a God who never ceases to create new beginnings? What if our life is simply a time when we are blessed with both sadness and joy, health and disease, courage and fear — and all the while we work, pray, and love, knowing that the promised land we seek is already present in the very gift of life itself, the inestimable privilege of a human birth? What if this single human life is itself the jewel in the lotus, the treasure hidden in the field, the pearl of great price? What if all the way to heaven is heaven? (79)

[Bill Bryson says something along the same lines as Muller:
". . . you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. . . . That you are able to sit here right now in this one never-to-be repeated moment, reading this book, eating bonbons . . . doing whatever you are doing--just EXISTING--is really wondrous beyond belief." ~ Notes From A Small Island, 120 - 21]