I rise and let my black-and-white dog outdoors. It’s 5:30 a.m. The grass, even in early December, is still green and barely frost-covered. The dog leaps from the low deck and ice-dust melts as he lands. Dark paw prints remain behind, and he’s gone. I look up at a sky the exact color of chrysanthemums, and then I turn my back. I did not know yet that it was extraordinary.
I am not thinking of God.
I am already too caught up in the bustles and get-goings of a winter morning. They spin like a roulette wheel gone mad in my head even though my body is moving the speed of sludge. I fill a mug and sit at the table. I know the dog will bark any minute — at a fox, a deer, his own shadow — and I’ll have to rise, feeling put upon and huffy, to let him in. My eyes are unfocused, but my head buzzes on.
I think of holiday cards, deadlines, invoices, rough drafts. Kids haircuts. Presents. My brother arriving soon and how I have to hide anything approximating dangerous, because he will find it and teach my sons how to use it, or fire it off, or spy with it. Report cards are coming. Doesn’t one child have to make a model of a fish, or an eye, or a cell of some sort? Hope they remember that, because I won’t. Hope someone did the wash. Hope there’s bread for sandwiches. Milk?
My coffee is almost gone, and it will be time to move into what we too often allow to become another frenzy day. I am not noble. I am not wise. I am not a morning person.
I still haven’t thought of God, or even said good morning to my husband. Perhaps I could try a small brass bell, ring it and start my day on a note of peace, or meditation, or prayer, giving thanks for something, for anything, for everything.
Instead I sit, snarly, lacking the profound on every level. My cup is my anchor; my hands hold it like a delicate bird’s nest.
And then a thud — the dog on the deck. A blaring, annoying broken- donkey-bleat from downstairs — the boys’ alarm clocks. The computer- welcome tone known the world over — my husband snapping on the laptop.
It is December. We can’t stop it now. We’re spinning.
I certainly hadn’t thought of God or how most relationships with him are, on our end, a muddle, a whirlpool, a cyclone twirl of haphazard and angst and hope. Not one of us knows at every given moment everything about God. And we each know we have to live with that not knowing. We’ve drawn a hard lot. It can make one’s head hurt, especially in the morning.
Later that day, I remember the sky the color of chrysanthemums and it brings me to a halt like a prayer.
Sometimes, maybe especially so in late year, we are so strung out or tightly wound or completely undone that we turn our backs out of self- preservation.
I had forgotten the morning-break, the impossible wash of orange and bare light that had lasted just a moment, perhaps long enough for the Clydesdale horses across town, with their high white blazes and their great white legs, to look up.
Surely, had any one of us been there with them, in the peace of their safe pasture, we could have heard them snuffle the manicured ground for dropped oats, tap their giant hooves, then startle suddenly, necks up, small puffs of air dissipating from their soft nostrils. Surely we would have seen them hesitate, the flower-colored sky’s impossible orange shining like a new playing card in their big eyes.
Perhaps we don’t need to think so much all the time. Perhaps sometimes we just need to look up, take a breath, and then turn back into the flow of the day moving with us in its tight grip. God’s here, whether we think about him or not. He’s full of wait and patience and will find a way in.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza- Chavez at grace-notes@ . Read more of her essays at gracenotes .
