Morning Has Broken

This morning, I dilly dallied in bed until nearly 6:15, comfortable with a single sheet on top of me and Finn stretched out at my feet.  Laying there, I was remembering the short battle Mark and I had had last night, the one in which I was ablaze with sweat, longing to turn on the air conditioner, which meant that we'd have to shut the windows.  I won.  But I realized this morning, as Mark had pointed out last night, that I had actually lost, because my longing for freon-tinged air had cut us off from everything that was outdoors.

What's a little sweat among beings, after all, if it means we remain connected?

I sought to rectify my last evening's mistake by heading straight out the door this morning, skipping even my daily constitution in return for early-morning wanderlust with dog on lead.  It was the right thing to do.  Which walking always seems to be.  Especially when done outdoors.

Walking has done more good for me than just about anything.  This simple, grounded, daily act of moving atop and through and next to everything that I happen to encounter has made my life both smaller and larger at the same time.  Rich in its purposelessness, it is a paradox that I am happy to have.

Maybe that's why I'm so quick to transition to "summer" mode each year--because I know that there are great rewards in waking up with no "to do" list, no papers to grade, no meetings to endure.  Summer, for me, then, is the calendrical equal of walking--a meandering season in which things just happen.  Or don't.  And I am deeply content to live with these question marks planted among the cherry tomatoes out back.

I realized the other day that, in all of my 53 years on this earth, only one has included an 8-to-5 summer of "proper" adult living.  It's probably not a coincidence that that year was the only one in which a pervasive heaviness sat upon my weary shoulders.

Like the 17-year cicadas that just now are shaking off the rich loam of their worn-out beds, I emerge giddy and bleary-eyed each summer morning to a world both changed and constant, a whirring song erupting from inside of me.  And walking is the act that shakes off my old shell, letting something new and shiny emerge in its place.

It is with relief, then, that I turn off the thermostat this morning, and raise the windows that locked me in last night, welcoming the outside in.