GOOD MORNING!!

Today we're celebrating all the Morning People--you know who you are!--you love to get up early, see the day open up, listen to birds singing the day awake, and put your feet on the floor, find your slippers, and toddle out to the coffee maker (or the electric tea pot) and hit the BREW NOW button.

Now I know I'm speaking to only a segment of the readership today--maybe fifty percent? I like to think that's a good estimate. So for all of you who are up and ready to read and will appreciate good thoughts about waking early, here's a poem for you. It's by Mary Oliver, American poet (1935-2019):

                                  Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.

Hello, you who make the morning

and spread it over the fields

and into the faces of the tulips

and the nodding morning glories,

and into the windows of, even, the

miserable and the crotchety—

 

best preacher that ever was,

dear star, that just happens

to be where you are in the universe

to keep us from ever-darkness,

to ease us with warm touching,

to hold us in the great hands of light—

good morning, good morning, good morning.

 

Watch, now, how I start the day

in happiness, in kindness.

 

This poem was published in 2004 in a collection called Why I Wake Early.

Mary Oliver published her first book of poetry in 1963 at the age of 28. Thereafter she published one or two books a year--sometimes poetry, sometimes prose--celebrating the natural world. She was born in Ohio, lived in various places, and chose as her last residence the woods and hills of Massachusetts. In later life, she moved to Florida.

For more poems, check out the website of The Poetry Foundation for her work.

Mary Oliver won many awards, among them a Pulitzer in 1984, the PEN/New England award in 1991, and the National Book Award in 1992.

Here's a thought from Mary Oliver that we can all take to heart:

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

-----

And we leave you with a piece of advice from poet Mary Oliver:

                      You must not ever stop being whimsical . . . .

photo: Rachel Geise Brown