In the Quiet of the Early Morning

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time at my computer early in the morning. I don’t mean at 6 a.m. I mean at 12:30 a.m. and at 1 a.m. and at 2 a.m. My days are so filled with marking things off my to-do list, handling emails and phone calls, social networking for business, running errands, and being a taxi driver for my children, that my real work — the writing — only gets done late at night and early into the morning. 

When everyone in the house has gone to bed, a peace fall over the house. Even though I’m home alone during the day, the birds and squirrels keep me company with their constant chatter. At night, they, too are silent, except for an occasional horned owl. Since I’m on the West Coast, my email box also stops filling with new mail in the early morning, because the rest of the people around the United States have long ago gone to bed as well. The only people still awake seem to be on FaceBook and Twitter. 

Sometimes, if I want some company…or I just want to procrastinate…I go to Twitter, where I find a few cyber friends with whom to interact. In the darkness of my office, with just the light over my desk, I send out little messages across time and space. It’s an odd connection, but it makes me smile more often than not.

And then I go back to my writing…maybe a blog post or a piece for my San Jose Jewish Examiner.com column. Sometimes it’s an article for a dance magazine or a trade journal. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, it’s a piece on something close to my heart. Or possibly I’m just knocking out a project that I need to complete.

In the quiet of the early morning, I can finally focus. The house is quiet. The world is quiet. My mind is quiet. Well, the last may not be quiet true. My mind is filled with words, but I can finally hear them.

If I take a few minutes just to sit quietly, I can hear other things: my breath, the cat climbing onto the clean clothes in the living room (where she isn’t allowed to sleep), the fountain trickling behind me, the hum of the printer, the Still Small Voice. Ah…I remember that voice. 

That voice tells me to put aside the other projects and write from my heart. It tells me to finish my unfinished projects. It tells me to persevere. It tells me I’m on the right track. It tells me to slow down and listen.

And then it tells me to go to sleep. The rest can wait until morning…well, until I wake up.  The problem comes when I do slide into bed beside my sleeping (and snoring) husband, and I cannot sleep. My thoughts, my words, have become too loud. In the quiet of the morning, they have become amplified, and it takes a long time for me to find a way to turn down the volume and sleep. If only I could find a program that would type all those words into my computer for me as I lay there in bed and as I slept. Oh, the writing I could accomplish.

But would it record the Still Small Voice as well? Or can we only hear that when we are awake, when we are conscious? I think, somehow, the sound of that voice might not be picked up by even the best microphone.

Now, again, it whispers to me…