Week 9: Time

Morning

Yesterday out on the river’s surface the small body of a grebe surfaced and submerged, surfaced and submerged like a good idea still working to develop itself. His small head and curved neck slid up out of the water when he surfaced, but he flipped over and his head went down first when he submerged. It was early so the ducks were out, a few geese, one egret so impossibly white against all of the morning gray. And the Rutgers crew team slid along the smooth water’s surface in two boats like the feet of a giant water strider bug.

Its not just the movements of the grebe that suggest a good idea—the whole world wakes in the morning, moves from dark to dawn to light in the way any idea slowly moves from the darkness of non-existence and slowly develops. And perhaps it is this reflection of idea-making that makes the morning the proverbial time of good ideas.

Thoreau writes: “The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.”

Billy Collins writes of morning:
Why do we bother with the rest of the day/the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,…/ This is the best—/throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,/and buzzing around the house on espresso—
maybe a splash of water on the face,/a palmful of vitamins—/but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,/dictionary and atlas open on the rug/the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,

(read Collin’s entire poem here http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2006/03/22

While Thoreau wrote that the only drink for a wise man is water, he and Collins both express here that there is something extra that happens in the morning that produces stronger and better thought. For Thoreau “some part of us awakes” that we can’t access the rest of the day. For Collins the typewriter waits “for the key of the head.” The assumption here is that the typewriter (or recorder of thoughts) is not so receptive after the morning hours.

And it does seem true on mornings when I go down to the river and the water is a mixture of stillness and activity—like a quiet mind developing productive and purposeful ideas.