- with love and squalor

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Despite my full intentions to sleep-in this morning, I found myself awake and unable to fall back asleep at an early hour. 7:06 am, specifically. The uncomfortable warmth of my room paired with the brightness of the dawn, flooding its light into my pale-yellow-painted bedroom woke me; the minor darkness my eyelids provide was no match.

Truthfully, I am not complaining. The morning is a beautiful time, special in its own way. Better wordsmiths and wiser people before me have talked of the beauty found in the morn’. Emily Dickinson wrote many poems about it, including “Morning-means” where she talked of how the morning appears differently to various people.

Concerning nature’s beauty, it is probably best to leave it at less words than too many. Thus, this morning smelled delicious: new, fresh, baring hints of (eventually, for Vancouver) imminent Summer. I’m not sure what the rest of the day’s weather is going to be, though my weather widget calls for rain. This morning, however, the sun shone its glory lightly, a reminder of yesterday’s loveliness and a promise to eventually return.

                                                                           We are the music makers,
                                                                  And we are the dreamers of dreams,
                                                                     Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
                                                                     And sitting by desolate streams; -
                                                                    World-losers and world-forsakers,
                                                                     On whom the pale moon gleams:
                                                                   Yet we are the movers and shakers
                                                                       Of the world for ever, it seems.

                                                                          - Arthur O’Shaughnessy