“Morning has Broken”
Alleluia! It’s really SPRING!
No matter when Easter happens on our March or April calendar each year, I’ve always felt that it somehow made Spring official. Something about everything being made new again. The world reminded, yet again, that life has a remarkable renewability to it in the cycle of things. I like to think that Spring is like the dawn of the year, after the long night of winter.
Mary Oliver, a favorite poet with a special gifted eye and heart for all of nature, titled one of her books of poetry, “Why I Wake Early!” She must have been thinking of Spring and the excitement of all that Spring has to offer, so much to wake up to, so much to connect with in our Springtime world.
Usually it is light that calls me out of sleep. Some special sensitivity to what is called our Circadian rhythm which lulls our bodies into sleep as light fades and then stirs us out of slumber as light re-emerges. We are naturally responsive to light. But for me in the Springtime it is bird song, even before light dawns, that presents a wake-up call to me.
In Springtime the birds begin to sing the day into being even before dawn slips over the horizon that marks the border between night and day. The birds seem to know, even before we do that it is going to be an exquisite day, full of light (no matter the weather) and full of emerging promise. Their message seems to be: “Wake up to what all of creation has to offer you in this day which has never happened before!” John Philip Newell offers a wonderful exciting thought when he reminds us, “The next moment has never happened before!” Maybe the birds know this and are waking us up to the idea that we don’t want to miss a moment of this day to come. They seem to be singing a message to us. “Everything is becoming new again and you don’t want to miss even a moment of the renewal offered by this day, do you?”
