On a particular morning you will wake to the sound of catbird chicks in the nest outside your window.  They will be calling for their mother to feed them.  You will realize you have been waiting for someone to feed you for far too long – an unfruitful wait, alas, leaving gaping holes where others would find some grace to face their day.

On this particular day you wake, let us call it May 19 everywhere in your world things are green from too much rain, the rivers swollen, the air wet enough to swim.  You wake on this particular day realizing that you are not a chick, that you have never been a chick; while you have been a child, once, decades ago, that was then not now.  Now you wake into your fully formed self, something moving up your body through your stomach your heart your throat your crown where you can almost see it cascade down around you like a shield of purple, a sea of green – a blue tsunami relentless in its insistence that you wake.  You wake and find it’s time for you to know that you do not know and that not knowing is its own awakening.

On this particular day at 7:03 a.m. (or so says the clock, incorrect by seconds which doesn’t count because time is a human construct), you wake; and you wake as a human fully grown, and know it’s best to greet the day not tousled-headed and bleary-eyed but grateful, open and aware.  You awake.  You stir.  You rise.

Wake.  Light fire and let the bridges burn to ash.  Ask for what you will.  Yes ask.  Awake.