one of my very favorite things, though, is the morning. i know that everyone who has known me on a waking up together basis is laughing at the thought that i would like anything about morning at all, but it's true.

this morning my brother and i left the house and the sky was a postcard. it was puffs of beath and immediately pink noses and cheeks

air like that makes everyone beautiful. and we yelped and laughed at touching the icy cold door and getting into the icebox car.

rubbing the world into view with a sleeve covered hand and pulling down knit caps tight. the heater on full blast and the first notes of this making everything like super 8 home films. past the small houses and apartment buildings, playing chicken with the bus. watching people walking head into the wind, fists pushed deep in pockets, passing under the tracks as the train moved slowly above. i pulled the cuffs straight on my new brown cardigan, and let the heat from my breath fog up my glasses a little as i snuggled down into my scarf, pulled tight. i wished so badly to be driving somewhere far away, rather to work. we could have gone to portland or canada or anywhere, really.

sometimes it's perfectly possible for the voice of a singer to make you feel completely optimistic about everything, and make you smile though your eyes are straining against the morning and your head is full of sand. there are so many of those on that cd, but mostly it's the song i wrote about last night that still made me calm and blissed out this morning.

the whole way to his school, my brother was in awe of the morning. it had long stretching clouds that looked like they were going to make a halo of the sky. the sun made everything golden and the trees hung over us like lazy lovers, the ones with the always-leaves, they were tangled in each other, lush and heavy like rain.

i have been having dreams of facecless men and women, with crowns and long elegant fingers. i have been sitting at their feet and kneeling when i listen to them speak.

i have fantasies of finding someone to look up to and admire, to serve and be important to.

if it weren't for that last bit, i would think that this is just another way my longing for god is expressing itself, but who has the arrogance to hope to be important to god?

the daydreaming of a monastic life has been coming more and more lately, and i am not sure what to make of it, because i don't have a tradition to practice, and i don't honestly believe that i am being called. i don't know what it would mean to be called anyway, but people say "you know", and i don't "know".

so i guess that settles that.

but i have this thing in me that i have yet to figure out or even look at with close eyes, and it embarrasses me, and confuses me and though the embarrassment isn't really shame it is a kind of foolish feeling. because i cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to reconcile my feelings about god and the rest of everything else in my life. particularly my thinking life. and it's not to do with being cut off from my feelings, my god, if i was more immersed in them i don't know what i would do. that i don't talk about them with many people, or with great ease to those i do, does not mean i am cut off from them. rather, this longing does not make sense in the context of my emotional landscape, either.

none of this is coherent, i know, but it's mornings like these that i am thankful, and that always brings up this longing.

i just wish it were more clear to me, that it wasn't so opaque. it's like trying to see the a portrait made of spiderweb fractures in a perfect piece of glass that is the window on a very busy street. there is the faintest impression of a face, you can see what may be the lines of the corner of the mouth, or the crows feet at the edge of a perfect eye, but you can't really make out the whole.

so it's the frustration of half-formed beauty, of listening to a lover while asleep, of driving on a long open road with no hills or scenery to discern how close you are to its end.

it's a kind of floating, on open sea. with the brightest sun washing out everything, my eyes, my mouth, my fingertips, my voice, even my name.

i keep believing that when i am finally swallowed by the sunshine drenched sea there will be answers given and an embracing because i have waited so long.

but i know there is no real reason for me to believe it.