Thursday Morning, 5AM
The full moon sets, and another day begins. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE
MY EYES POPPED OPEN. The bedroom was inky black. No light had yet leaked in around the edges of curtains, so I knew: It was too early to leave my golden slumbers. And yet my mind was racing. So I fumbled around on my bedside bookshelf for my phone.
O.K., 5:02AM it is.
Time to begin my day!
Twenty minutes later I had my morning coffee in hand, and I was seated in my favorite chair, overlooking our backyard. Except, I couldn’t see anything but the setting moon, which was full.
In a meditation class I attended, the instructor proposed a morning exercise. She asked us to simply sit with our morning coffee, to take that time to take in the sensations of the day, to treat our thoughts like a cloud moving across the moon, and let them drift off the same way they appeared.
That was easy last Thursday morning, because I could see actual clouds drifting across the actual moon. It was magical, really.
The rising light made me think of one of my favorite novels: The Waves, by Virginia Woolf. In it she parallels the movement of the sun with the progression of her character’s lives, from dawn to death.
“The sun had not yet risen,” Woolf wrote. “The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.”
And then…
“The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.”
At long last, my coffee cup was empty and the sunlight was coming. So I turned to the important stuff I tackle as I begin my day.
One day closer to the dark, now, in the Woolfian sense. I’m so glad for the moonrise.
If the shark stops moving, it dies. Same goes for this substack. Care to move it on, to a friend?
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I save wordle for the end of day. But the mini crossword is my morning requirement.
Peter,
Thanks for listening to my call for Old School Art. Reminded me that I should do more landscape caressing. And for the record: I've checked "The Waves" out of the library on your recommendation. First impression is that every one of Virginia's sentences should be painted. ( probably watercolor) Cheers