Morning people.
You know, those peppy people who hop out of bed with the sunrise and get stuff done?
Some of them like to comment about how we slow risers should get out of bed earlier.
Out here in the heartland we have the undercurrent of the farm chore work ethic also; those that don’t get out of bed early are just lazy slackers.
Despite the social pressure, multiple alarm clocks, kids hitting me in the head with sippy cups, I’ve never been able to wake up quickly.
My mom tells me it’s always been this way, even when I was a kid.
She said my brain just wakes up parked.
My engine is running, but I just can’t quite get the gearshift into drive.
Lately I’ve been trying to address my morning sluggishness, as life would go a lot smoother if I’d get to the studio earlier, errands would get run before class, and so on.
Everyone I know has recently been on this theme of getting up earlier; it was like the universe was talking to me. I even heard a story on this on NPR the other morning (while I was lying in bed). The scientist being interviewed studies birds, and in his overly excited morning-person kind of way, he says, “If you don’t get up before the sun comes up, you’ve missed the best part of the day!” I heard myself think, “Oh man, he needs a good hard slap.” I guess birds get all their errands done before the sun comes up.
I’ve been reading this simple meditation book called Meditation 24/7 by a teacher named Lorin Roche. The whole idea of the book is to just be mindful of your everyday activities. (It’s a good book, but after the first 30 pages, you just “get it” already and it’s hard to finish.) I thought if anyone could help me with my morning lull it would be Mr. Roche, as this guy is just walking around happy to be alive 24/7. So I looked up the “morning meditation” section, and found a meditation called the “awakening practice.” I started reading with an open mind, but soon my surly morning attitude started leaking into my consciousness. “Whenever possible, awaken naturally without an alarm,” he says. I hear myself think, “Yeah well, that will be about 9:30am, Lorin, ha ha.” He describes becoming aware as consciousness “returns from the vastness and gradually condenses back into the body.” Usually my true consciousness, at least the part of me that knows where my keys are, doesn’t emerge until about 9am. Then after I truly awaken, I reach a state that’s been described by others as a “firecracker” or a “powerhouse”. References to Red Bull have been made by my loving friends. Neo says backbends are to me like Red Bull is to other people.
I tried Lorin’s entire “awakening practice” the other morning. As soon as I noticed I was awake, I started following my breath while paying attention to the “experience” of awakening like he wrote about. Honestly, it was pretty brutal. All I could think was “ouch.” I sat up and looked around the room, bringing myself into the room and into the now. I said his suggested mantra to myself, “I am grateful to be alive. I am awake to the beauty of life.” Then, the surly girl in my head started laughing at me. I ignored her and got up and went out the back door to see the beauty of my backyard. Um, not so much. It needed mowing.
I sat on the picnic table bench and had to deal with myself. Certainly I should be able to find some beauty in this morning, in the miracle of life. Why do I have such a bad morning attitude? I gave up and just sat there. Then I heard them. In fact, they were so loud that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard them before. Crickets. They were chirping their little heads off. It was so loud it was incredible, and then I realized there was another different tone playing back-up to the crickets, the cicadas. In my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, I grew up with the loudest species of cicada in the world. Sometimes in Lawrence we have to raise our voices outside in order to hear each other over the cicadas. Really. I was impressed that these Oklahoma crickets could out-sing them. Go Sooner bugs! It occurred to me that I’ve been cleaning up a lot of dead crickets around the house lately--and hearing them chirp throughout the day. Realization of the cricket boom set in. In our modern life, we often miss the ebb and flow of the species of bugs that would have been quite evident to the people who came before us, living out here in their sod houses.
How in the world do these crickets make this much noise? I remembered Slim telling me that they use their wings by rubbing them together. They “stridulate.” I sat there imagining all these crickets around me rubbing their wings together, talking to each other. I wondered what they were talking about. “Hey, what the heck is she doing up this early?” “Maybe there is hope for her!” It turns out the crickets here in the Bible belt are kind of religious.
Slim found me sitting at the kitchen table drinking my tea. He had a perplexed look on his face and was wondering why I was up. I asked him to go outside and watch the sunrise with me as the pink and red glow moved over us through the bottom of the clouds. After I told him about my oneness with the crickets and cicadas, he replied, “It’s kinda funny how you come from the loudest place on earth!”
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