This Morning I Woke Up

There is a reason bears hibernate. It is so easy to crawl inside yourself in winter. It is not the cold winds chasing me in or the slickness of the earth's surface beneath the dustings of snow. It is not even the impersonation of death the world takes on, the trees naked and thin, the sky dark and ominous. It is the desperate longing of the spirit, pleading in the absence of sound where once there was the chirping of birds and the laughing of children playing and the music of life being lived. In the quiet one can finally hear the soul's need for rest.

In terms of life, I have not been still at all. Every moment of my life has been planned out in little notes and schedules I scribble in my planner. My life has become one long to-do list. Between school and work and the meager social life I now have, there has seemed little time for the extras, for getting lost in a book of my own choosing, for blogging, for fueling those creative embers that never seem to fully die out. I am glad that no matter how smothered they become beneath the responsibilities of the practical, they always remain warm, ready to be ignited, ready to burn.

Because it is not, in fact, the chaotic bustle of my life that has kept me from writing. I have had time to fit it in. There is always time for the things that we love, it is simply a matter of knowing how to look for it. Instead, it has been that need to rest, to hold a lid over my creativity and let it simmer, regenerate, reemerge as something new, something more. This morning I woke up feeling as though it had.

Perhaps, yes, it is the weather. Perhaps it is that at this very moment spring is wafting in through my open windows in a way that makes one feel as though they can actually smell sunshine itself. Perhaps it is nothing more and nothing less than the beautiful invitation of this day. Outside a basketball bounces in perfect rhythm against the sidewalk. A car starts. A bird sings. A child squeals in delight. A familiar melody forms, inspiring a brand new song, the sweetness of the air it's soothing base.

Creatively I step out of the cave. I take off the lid. I boil over.

I sit by my window, reveling in the way eyes that have been closed in slumber for too long burn in the light, just before adjusting perfectly to the blaze.