ATaste of Morning
by Jeanie Wedekind, MFT

Most mornings for the past seven months, I have begun my day with a pot of tea, and writing practice. It is a ritual: a gentle practice I don't need to discipline myself to do. I feel deprived those days I don't take time to write. I make a pot of tea sweetened with honey and milk, sit in my favorite chair, light a candle, and write three pages of whatever comes through my hand onto the paper. I love this tasting of morning. My life has opened up because of it.

Some mornings, I start with my body sensations, taking note of this or that familiar ache, a restlessness, my sleepy head. Leisurely, I greet the terrain (and subterrain) of my body/mind, savoring the subtle shifts of sensation. Time and again, I return to the warmth and sweetness of the tea, sliding down my throat. Sips punctuate my words and phrases, and encourage me toward adventure.

The first few months brought a gush of words and feelings. They startled and energized me. The phrases formed themselves, infusing the moments of my life with fresh flavor. Voices I'd long forgotten or had never known began to shape themselves into moving images. Because there is no standard of performance or quality to meet, I can play. Words rhyme, resonate, or go off on a wild ride. I paint with color, texture, sound and movement. I look words up in the Webster's I keep nearby, finding the Middle English, Early English or Latin. The roots reveal their earthier meanings and original concrete uses.

Sometimes it's the juxtaposition of words that pleases me, the arrangement of nouns and verbs, adjectives and prepositions, placed like flowers and moved around thoughtfully until arriving at a vibrant bouquet. The rearrangement is part of the joy.

Cactus nearby, a bowl of pricklers. My hands can feel from a distance their stiff spines, sharp hairs. Insidious. Painful. Each plant shape distinct. Different greens, red overtones turning toward brown and yellow. Furry, fuzzy. Another's planes turn inward then out, accordian-like. Nodules of spikes. What's another word? Vortices. Whorls. Another? Starfish-like clusters of white. Bumpy, like measles, on slender green fringes.

I love the words that caress and stroke matter. How can I keep these words wet? Not use the same old shopworn ones, but alive, succulent ones. Perishable flower petals of words that bloom and die. Evanescent, fragile to the touch of hand, easily bruised if not lightly and respectfully apprehended and wondered at. Breathtaking aura of pink and yellow, invisible perfume to the eyes, to the psyche, to the senses.

Sometimes I linger in my dreams of the night before: the flavor, the emotional tone, recurrent themes of foreign countries, new houses, and lovers. I may delve into the images, exploring and unpacking, or just saunter around in the landscape, finding new combinations of elements and interesting angles. The dream images, thus anchored, filter through my day, adding a comment here, a new understanding there.

I may even let myself make my obsessive to do lists; some days, I fill all three pages, taking great pleasure in the enumeration of specific, accomplishable tasks. They may never get done. I weave back and forth among these paths, and between the personal and the global. I go deep within, and range outward.

Darkness comes. Pain, mine and others'. The vast, grinding machine of events. Cruelty. Thoughtlessness. Tragedy and mishap. I feel overwhelmed in the face of it. Then I bring it back to me. The oppression, unconsciousness and cruelty in me. The wars in me. Where's my anger? There. My violence? Here. Own it. Know it. Sadness, shame and guilt. Get to know all of it in me. Not separate from the world. Looking outward, the world seems too big, discontinuous, other. But in these pages I feel the wars from here. When I write in judgment, I get to see my shadow. I get to bring it back to myself where I have choice.

Now, I can have compassion for myself, understand and bring awareness to the darkness in myself. Not ward off pain, not act out, but embrace and hold those aspects of me that would act unconsciously and even hurtfully. Even find the impulse toward life in each dark unlit nook of myself. I begin to see the beauty and gentleness that also fill the world.

Webster's defines compassion thusly: "to suffer together, to feel pity, sympathy, accompanied by an urge to help." I hope that by savoring the cup of tea, the dream travels, the play with words, a growing compassion for myself will in some way, or even many ways, echo out into the larger world.

These words recur in my writing: compassion, relationship, presence, relax, breathe. They ebb and flow in their aliveness. The specific terrain of experience and the particular contours of language make all the difference to me. The global gets so vague I can't navigate. This morning, this moment, I have drunk my morning allotment of tea. It is gone. The warmth and sweetness - and the bite - linger in my mouth, my throat and my belly.

Jeanie Wedekind, MFT, has a private practice in Santa Rosa. She helps children and adults of all ages to heal through finding and engaging their own creative passion.

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