Here I am grateful again, darn it. I just can’t help it. I imagine that if I were to look back over my blogs of the past few months I would discover a number of patterns. One I bet I would find is that blogs written on Sunday nights tend to be a little more on the blue, lower-energy side. On weekends when I have a lot more time on my hands and am faced with overwhelming to-dos, suffer occasionally from loneliness and isolation, and have to will myself to keep active and moving are the times I struggle with writing this blog. On Wednesdays, often buoyed by the afternoon spent volunteering at the Berkeley Food Pantry, the blogs I write on those nights are often more upbeat, insightful, and free-flowing. The blogs I write in the last days of one month and the first days of the next are often more intense than those more in the middle of the month. Like many people the “how’m’I gonna’s” hit me at the first of the month–“how’m’I gonna” pay some of these bills, “how’m’I gonna sort things out,” etc.
This blog is like a barometer–a measure of the changes in pressure in my life and what type of weather is going to result from how I handle them. I found myself thinking about the line from the psalm that says, “weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning. Most people don’t have “dark mornings of the soul…” that doesn’t even sound right. No, people mostly have dark nights of the soul. Anyone who’s ever kept a night vigil, praying through the literal dark of night as well as from the shadowy darkness of mind and spirit knows what that feels like. For the most part I am a joy cometh in the morning kind of person. Perhaps not bubbly, effervescent, overflowing joy, but the light of a new day often dispels much of the indigo moods of the previous night. And these days I am as likely to cry first thing in the morning as I am late at night, so I don’t always “wake at dawn with a winged heart.” Nevertheless, on weekday mornings I find that I can generate and sustain a general sense of wellbeing throughout most if not all of the day. I am grateful if at times a bit mystified by this ability.
Each morning over the past several weeks I wake ahead of the alarm (set for 6 a.m. on weekdays and 7 a.m. on weekends) with my heart charged with adrenalized energy that sometimes radiates out into my limbs. It’s like having drunk too much of a highly-caffeinated energy drink and being somewhat jittery without actually shaking. It is, as you can probably discern from this poor description, a difficult condition to detail. Some mornings I literally jolt awake–my mind immediately springs into working long before the rest of my body realizes what’s happening. I have learned not to fight this, trying to will myself back to sleep; it generally doesn’t work anyway. So I lie there for a little while before starting my day, which begins with my morning journal writing. I have found my journal to be a great help in sorting out whatever lingering feelings I had from the previous night’s meanderings as well as allowing me to clear issues, fears and anxieties by releasing them onto the pages. These bookend writing experiences are valuable to me, even when I am on occasion visited by the accursed blinking cursor phenomenon.
So yes, I am in fact grateful again today. I am here once again and will likely be here for a while. It’s good for me to periodically go to the edge and look over. Maya Angelou said, “Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer.” She’s onto something, that Dr. Angelou. For that is indeed what gratitude has been and is for me. Selah.
