Foggy morning mysteries

Do you have a favorite time of day?

Although I do it rarely, I love waking up early and seeing the earth outside my windows before day breaks. Because I live in the mountains I don't get a glorious sunrise (we hillbillies have to go to the beach for those). By the time the sun makes an appearance over the ridge line and travels up behind the trees that surround this little patch, the yard has seen daylight for quite a while.

This morning I woke up in the five o’clock hour, feeling rested, and was out of the bed with a tea kettle on

by 6am. The kitchen was dark when I went downstairs, but the back yard glowed with an early morning fog billowing up from the ground. If it had been summer there would have been a clamor of birds, but all was quiet on this December morning.

I read that we are nearing the end of Samhain season with the year turning towards Yule and the winter solstice. Dark days are still upon us, and getting darker still. The luminescent fog that’s settled all around me reminds me that the veil is thin.

I’m not going to pretend to know what that really means—the thinning of the veil. I mean, I know it’s a time when the stuff—whatever that stuff is— that separates our everyday waking world from all the other worlds is more transparent, easier to cross. It is a good time for fortune-telling, card reading, messages from those on the other sides, and so forth.

Part of the reason this thinning of the veil talk has not been salient for me as a concept is because my life is constantly in transition. My time on earth thus far has been rather topsy-turvy. I have learned to be comfortable in liminal space, to seek it out, to live in times and spaces of transition. My big challenge here in the second half of my life is to get more grounded, more rooted, more embodied.

In any case, and in any time of the year, I’m in the habit of calling on a mamaw to help me have wisdom. And certainly the world outside, the green-brown world, is always talking with me, whispering to me words of love and belonging. If there are other worlds in the beyond they don’t interest me much. The Virginia pine has my ear, and the crow too, and the big rock that sits in the middle of the river, and the bunnies with their white cottontails flashing in the morning fog.