Meet Me In The Morning
There is a headland not far from where I live that I’ve been visiting of a morning. I try to get up there early, before sunrise, in the murky dawn before the colours of the day have set. I like to feel the first light from the rising sun hit me, its warmth tingling through my body. I feel then as the ember must feel when touched by the zephyr. Below me, the ocean seems to be a living thing, the rise and fall of the swell reminiscent of a breathing, heaving chest.
The headland is high above the water and from there I can watch the great waves peel off the surface of the ocean, curling up like metal shavings before throwing themselves against the shore with an intensity that leaves me with no doubt that, if not for the volcanic rock to stop them, they would surely roll on right across the continent.
When the ocean is calm, and the wind doesn’t blow, such is the quiet of these mornings that the soundscape is dominated by nothing more robust than the chirruping of the superb fairy wrens that flit from windswept shrub to tall grass, haranguing and organising and impressing their harems of tiny brown females.
On some mornings, humpback whales make an appearance as they undertake their migration south, newborns by their side, leaping and breaching and punching great holes in an ocean the colour of elephant hide, sending explosions of white water high in the air. One time, a mother shepherded her calf into the rocks below my feet, lazing gently on her back, exposing her great white belly to the sky, one giant pectoral fin waving in the air like a mainsail, before bringing it down hard upon the surface of the water with a resounding slap.
Up here on the headland it feels as if time travel is possible. For what I hear, before the morning fills with the sounds of engines and coffee grinders and angle grinders and rubbish bins being wheeled down concrete driveways, are ancient sounds, sounds that have filled the morning air long before man and God and law, sounds that transport me back in time.
And these mornings make me think of other mornings.
In Argentina, the rising sun signals not the start of the day but the end of the night. As the sun hauls itself over the River Plate, Argentina’s great river that looks like Argentine coffee and most likely tastes like it too, you can find the residents of Buenos Aires, the porteños, flowing out of the bars and clubs, filling the streets like a defeated army, that having lost every battle are still convinced they’re winning the war. And while I would drag myself home to bed, the porteños would drag themselves home to shower and eat and then head to the office. This was a typical Tuesday.
On the Pacific coast of Colombia, in a fishing village that survived day-to-day on what they could catch, mornings were peering into the darkness of the dawn as we waited for the sun to reveal that ancient landscape of forest and ocean like waiting for a polaroid picture to develop. On black sand beaches, seated low in a hand-carved canoe, we waited for a break in the waves to paddle out to the fishing grounds. And if you got the timing wrong, rather than the canoe being on the waves the waves were on the canoe. The mornings were often wet but always filled with hope; of the fishing to come, hope that come the evening there would be food on the table.
All the energy in the universe has already been created. There is no more. What we have can only be transferred and transformed. And that thought brings me some peace in the morning as I look out on the new day. Whatever I need to do, whatever I want to do, the energy to achieve it is out there, waiting to be harnessed and used. Anything is possible.
And because anything is possible in the morning, that is the hour of hopes and dreams. The morning is a starting point, all is before you. As a young boy, in the mornings I dreamt of the day ahead. In my teens I dreamt of my life ahead. Older now, I dream of the present. Of being in it, appreciating it, holding on to it.
At times when I find myself within the confines of the city, I feel that at every turn my vision is blocked and stymied by concrete and glass and metal and brick. The effect is that my thoughts are turned back upon themselves, deflected internally. And once that happens, once my thoughts are trapped, the world is reduced to the space inside my head.
But in the morning, in front of the ocean, my eyes roam to the horizon, I look north and south and believe that I can see the curvature of the earth’s surface. And where my gaze goes my thoughts follow, and out here, on the headland, when compared to the magnitude of the morning, of the natural world, my thoughts, myself and my problems, are small and insignificant.
Watching that great ball of fire rise from the ocean, feeling its energy touch my skin, my thoughts unleashed, it seems possible to think something that might be worth a damn, and if I can think something that's worth a damn, maybe one day I’ll write something that might be worth a damn too.
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You're already writing things worth way more than a damn Ryan! You've managed to put into beautiful words and images the thoughts that many of us have in those soft early hours of the day when anything is possible. Thank you.
The writer Olga Masters (mother of Chris and Roy and Deb and Sue and others) visited one of my adult classes nearly 40 years and spoke of getting up early in the morning to do her writing - before her household - and the world itself - woke up. One of my old students from 35 years ago - an established, accomplished poet - Brad Evans - living many years now in Cambridge (UK) has sent me a translation of Giacomo Leopardi's early 19th century poem "il sabato del villaggio" - that sense of anticipation of the day of rest and enjoyment - of the carefree lad, the young maiden - the old woman, too - each in their way looking forward to the brief freedom from labours - though the older person well aware of how fleeting such things are. As we all come to realise the older we get. I had sent him a reference to the Romanian poet Ion Muresan. Glebe resident poet writer Antigone Kefala's latest book is a series of brief reflections taken from her journal/diaries "Late Journals" 2022 - born in the early 1930s in Braila in Romania - to Aotearoa/New Zealand for her schooling/university - to Australia in 1960 - an important figure in the arts world (Australia Council). Your vision and lyrical play re the bursting forth of the sun onto your waiting person across the Pacific from the headland - and how it was for you in La Argentina - or, indeed those early morning fishing ventures in the north-east of America del Sur - a sense of quiet - of waiting for the moment - that - for me - captures the feelings of Olga Masters -putting down her thoughts on paper - until the sounds from the world told her it was time to move to the kitchen - getting her husband to work and her grand-children then there with her, too, to school.