the morning hours
Dear friend,
La mulți ani de Sfântă Xenia! Wishing you many years today on the feast of my patron saint, Saint Xenia of St. Petersburg. May she pray to God for us! May she teach us to be holy fools and people of prayer.
Upon my arrival back to Romania, I found myself struggling more than I usually do with jet lag. It struck the second night, pulling me from sleep at 4:30 in the morning and, despite my protests, pushing me more and more into wakefulness with every passing quarter-hour. Finally I surrendered, hoisting myself upright and lighting a candle on the little table in my icon corner at the foot of my bed. I refused to give over to artificial light at this time of night, but figured I might as well take advantage of these dark wakeful hours, and so I grabbed my journal and pen and decided to resurrect my old, nearly-forgotten habit of “morning pages.”
My friend Becca first introduced me to the concept of morning pages back when both she and I were living in New Mexico during the pandemic. Becca is a writer and creative mentor to me (check out her Substack for some excellent writing on Mystery, Memoir, and Meaning) and I was eager to try this creative practice that she recommended. The idea itself comes from Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” and it is simply the practice of writing three full long-hand pages of whatever comes to mind when you first wake up. It is meant to be a sort of stream-of-consciousness journal that serves no other purpose than getting what’s in your head onto the page first thing in the morning. Most of it is (and should be) fluff that you will never look back to. But the idea is that this serves as a sort of creative well pump that clears out all the garbage so you can get to the good stuff.
I adopted this practice and indeed benefited from it creatively for many many months, but when I moved back to Romania I just never seemed to get the habit going again. Until this month, when I decided to harness the circadian chaos of jet lag to make me into a morning person—that is, someone who could rise before dawn and cultivate a proper morning routine. I am naturally a night owl, but the call of the morning lark has long intrigued me. And so I am slowly settling into a new schedule of sleep to see if it serves me in some way.
I am trying to wake at 6 most days, because this gives me two dark, quiet hours in which I can set the tone of the coming day. I use only candlelight because I love the warm living flame and the way it grounds me in reality. For this reason I also do not open my computer or my phone. I begin the day with my morning prayers (here’s one that I particularly love), drink a mug of tea, and write my three morning pages in a notebook. Then I read a chapter or two from whatever book I am working through that week, and by the time I finish the sun is up and I am ready to attend to whatever the day’s agenda has set before me. It is a simple routine made of simple acts—striking a match, reciting prayers, putting pen to paper, thumbing through the pages of a book—but they are spiritual and creative practices on which I can balance the rest of my day. When I can watch the day bloom into being on the other side of my window, I am reminded of the cyclical nature of our days and our own rhythms within them. I remember how good and important it is for me to have a routine—indeed, to start my day with one.
I am in no way wanting to suggest that there is something morally superior in waking early, and I am also aware that it is a great privilege that I am able to start my days in such soft, slow, indeed luxurious ways. I guess I merely want to say that I’m grateful for these early hours that I had for so long neglected. When I awoke on Saturday morning, in the blue of lingering night, I was able to look out on the fresh rolls of snow that had been carefully laid over our valley beginning the previous evening (a welcome snowfall after a disappointingly dry season and a very rainy, sadly spring-like January week). Up in the mountains beyond the last neighborhood bloc I saw one unmistakably human light, like a single star in a dark swath of sky. It burned steady and warm like my own candle flame behind me. My eye couldn’t leave it alone, this little sign of human life in the wilderness, mirroring my own. It made me feel something that I couldn’t quite name, and I thanked God for the darkness that revealed it to me. When the sun rose, out of sight beyond the mountains but still diffusing her dawn light across our visible sky, the heavens were streaked with pink, and the snows were likewise soft and radiant, and the gray of our blocs and the bare treetops and the smoke rising from the houses scattered up the hill behind us seemed to glow in their own way with the joy of something as new, and as ancient, as a morning.
And so, with joy I write to you,
Xenia
