Five O'Clock, Before the World Wakes

There is an hour in the morning when the house belongs neither to the night nor to the day. The darkness has begun, almost imperceptibly, to surrender its dominion, though the windows offer little evidence of the coming light. Nothing stirs beyond the small, familiar sounds of a sleeping household. The world, with all its magnificent inconveniences, has not yet remembered that I exist.

It is five o'clock, and for a little while, I belong to myself.

My dogs settle on either side of me, faithful sentinels at the threshold of whatever country I am about to enter. They have no particular interest in my spiritual development, so far as I can tell. Nevertheless, they keep their watch with a devotion that would shame many a religious institution. I sometimes imagine them as hounds guarding the gates of hell, though their duties are considerably less demanding than those of their mythological relations.

In my hand, I hold a stone.

Usually it is the tiger's eye I have worn and kept close for years, its bands of gold and brown shifting in the uncertain light. I have lived with this stone long enough that calling it a possession seems inadequate. There are objects we acquire, objects we use, and objects with which, through some mysterious accumulation of attention and affection, we enter into relationship.

This stone belongs to the last category.

I do not hear it speak. There is no disembodied voice offering counsel, no revelation delivered in the language of men. What I experience is quieter, more intimate, and considerably more difficult to explain. It is a meeting of presences, a sense that our energies, our consciousnesses, are holding hands for a little while, intertwining in the stillness.

It has become a friend, a partner, a confidant.

I have never found it necessary to believe that consciousness belongs exclusively to those creatures capable of announcing their thoughts. The world has always seemed to me far more inhabited than our customary divisions between the living and the lifeless would suggest. I do not imagine that a stone must resemble a human being inwardly in order to possess a nature worthy of reverence. Indeed, I rather hope it does not. Humanity has made quite enough of a spectacle of itself.

So I sit with my old companion, and together we turn toward the approaching day.

May I be protected. May I have courage, wisdom, and cunning. May I possess the strength to say and do what most needs to be said and done.

I ask for cunning quite deliberately. Wisdom is a noble aspiration, but there are circumstances in which wisdom requires a certain cleverness to accomplish anything at all. The world is not always persuaded by virtue alone.

These are not petitions addressed to a distant power enthroned somewhere beyond the visible universe. I have come to understand God, the Sacred, as the presence filling all things, myself included. The divine is not waiting at the far end of an arduous pilgrimage. It is here, in the stone resting against my palm, in the warm bodies of the dogs beside me, in the breathing creature I happen to be.

My witchery has grown from this understanding. It lives among the ordinary occupations of my days: in candles made with intention, oils blended according to their properties and correspondences, plants tended with affection, meals prepared with care, and words committed to paper with purposes that reach beyond the page. I have no altar set apart from the rest of my life. I have never felt that the Sacred requires one particular arrangement of furniture before it will consent to be present.

After sitting with my stone, I begin to move.

The movements are slow, almost imperceptibly so at times, resembling yoga in their deliberate attention to breath, posture, and the quiet negotiations between muscle and bone. There is nothing athletic about them, unless one considers the business of persuading a reluctant body to unfold at five in the morning a legitimate sporting achievement.

I breathe. I move. I notice.

Gradually, the concerns of the approaching day loosen their claim upon my attention. The house, the work awaiting me, the conversations I anticipate, the thousand small responsibilities that ordinarily assemble themselves into a formidable procession: for a little while, they recede.

My attention settles into the movement itself, into the passage of breath, into the curious experience of being alive within a body.

Sometimes there is pain.

A muscle complains. Some stiffness, acquired during the night, announces itself with unnecessary conviction. I do not always attempt to make it disappear. I notice where it lives, how it changes with movement, whether it softens when I remain attentive rather than impatient. Sometimes, as I hold a position or repeat a movement, the discomfort releases. Sometimes it does not.

Either way, I have listened.

There is a particular intimacy in attending to one's own body without immediately demanding that it become something other than it is. We spend so much of our lives issuing instructions to the flesh, measuring its usefulness, lamenting its alterations, and treating its limitations as personal affronts. Yet this body has carried every joy and sorrow I have ever known. It has endured my neglect as well as my affection. It has remained with me through every version of myself I have outgrown.

Surely it deserves an occasional kindness.

And then there are the ghosts.

I am, by temperament, an analytical man. A Virgo, for those inclined to consult the heavens concerning such matters, and a rather accomplished worrier for those who prefer observable evidence. I examine conversations long after they have ended. I consider the hidden meanings of another person's words, the possible consequences of my own, the delicate and often exhausting complexities of human relationships.

Sometimes these concerns accompany me into sleep.

They wander through my dreams, borrowing strange faces and unfamiliar settings, arranging themselves into little dramas whose significance may be profound or utterly nonexistent. Often I wake feeling lighter, as though sleep has performed some private labor of reconciliation. But not always.

Some worries linger like ghosts in the shadows.

I have learned not to be especially alarmed by their presence. In the quiet of the morning, I sit with them. Sometimes I even dance with them, though the choreography is seldom elegant.

I listen to their stories.

There may be an old fear wearing the clothes of a new circumstance, a conversation I have rehearsed too many times, or some unspoken sorrow that has found its way into a dream. Occasionally the body has kept its own record of the night's disturbances: a tense shoulder, an aching back, muscles made sore by restless sleep.

I do not insist that these visitors explain themselves. Nor do I demand that they leave.

I receive them as I might receive a friend who has arrived at my door burdened by some private misery. We sit together, proverbially speaking, over a cup of coffee. I allow the story to unfold, even when I have heard portions of it before. I resist the temptation to interrupt with solutions.

There are sorrows that require action, certainly, and difficulties that will not yield to contemplation alone. But not every troubled thought arrives in search of a remedy. Some have simply gone too long without being heard.

And eventually, quite often, the story ends.

The ghost has said what it came to say. There is nothing further to add. Without ceremony or conquest, it withdraws into the darkness from which it emerged.

I do not call this victory. I have conquered nothing. I have merely offered an audience.

By then, the morning has begun to claim me.

I rise and turn toward the practical ceremonies of becoming presentable to the world. There is a shower to take, clothing to choose, the familiar sequence of preparations that marks the passage from private existence into public life.

Yet I have never regarded these things as entirely separate from my spiritual practice.

The shampoos, conditioners, and soaps I use are made with essential oils and fragrances I love: eucalyptus, lavender, rosemary, the deep resinous warmth of amber. My colognes, too, are composed of oils. Their scents mingle with the steam, gathering in the warm air and settling upon my skin.

I think of this as an anointing.

The body I have just listened to, with its aches and memories, its astonishing capacities and occasional indignities, is washed and tended with the care one might once have lavished upon the sanctuary of a long-forgotten deity. The fragrances rise like holy incense.

And the deity being honored is myself.

Not myself as something separate from the rest of creation, nor as a little sovereign demanding worship, but myself in the fullness of body, mind, and spirit. A particular expression of the Sacred, deserving of the same reverence I would extend to the stone in my hand or the living world beyond my windows.

I choose my clothes, most often in the earthy, grounding colors to which I am naturally drawn. There is something satisfying in the quiet deliberation of it, in allowing even these ordinary decisions to belong to the larger practice of inhabiting my life consciously.

Eventually, I must leave the shelter of the morning.

Beyond the house waits the familiar world of work and errands, expectations and misunderstandings, people with their own worries, ambitions, private griefs, and improbable hopes. I cannot pretend that the serenity of five o'clock accompanies me unbroken through every hour. My analytical mind remains very much employed, frequently without having been asked. There are days when I forget nearly everything I have remembered in the morning.

Still, I try.

At the coffeehouse, for instance, I try to see the barista not merely as the person preparing my drink but as someone whose existence is as intricate and mysterious as my own. There is a whole life standing before me, a history I do not know, a private landscape of affections, disappointments, loyalties, fears, and desires. This person has awakened into a world as consequential to them as mine is to me.

How astonishing that is, when one considers it.

We exchange a few words. Perhaps a smile. A cup passes from one hand to another. For an instant, two entire lives touch.

Our lives kiss, and then move on.

I cannot know what the rest of that person's day will hold. Nor can they know what ghosts accompanied me through the hours before dawn, or what prayers I offered while holding an old tiger's eye in the darkness. We remain, for the most part, strangers.

Yet something has passed between us, however briefly. Two presences have acknowledged one another in a world that is too often hurried to notice.

Perhaps this is why I cherish the hour before the household wakes. It allows me to begin the day in conversation with the life around and within me, before the louder conversations commence.

The dogs keep their watch. The stone rests in my hand. My ghosts are permitted to speak. My body is given its due. Nothing is required to become extraordinary in order to be sacred.

And somewhere beyond the windows, while I am still breathing slowly in the dark, the first light begins its patient work upon the world.