Dawn Concerto

Before I realize I am waking up, my stomach twists. Deeper in my gut there's an ominous rumble, then nothing. Churning anxiety in my gut. After repeated efforts to quiet my body, the tossing and turning returns. I twist, pull into fetal position, roll over, half-sit to move the pillows back into place. My leg slides under the sheet toward a cooler patch on the right side of the bed. My toes seek freedom at the edge of the blanket. Then my head and arms stretch left. I am spiraling my outside body trying to relieve the inner gut twist. I toss off the top of my blankets, exposing my shoulders. "Maybe I'm just too hot." Then I grab the covers tighter around my neck against the surprising chill, sweat evaporating.

"Great!” I mutter to myself. Sweaty. Acidic twisted gut. Tossing and turning. “What's there to be anxious about?" But my nature and my habits converge in a perfect storm to produce this dark of the morning wave of sleep-wrecking, body anxiety.

Consciousness rises just a bit and for a split second I feel sorry for myself. I think I want the comfort of Nick's body next to mine. But he is not here. And anyway, he is insistent on having his dreamy deep sleep left alone and untouched on his side of the bed, uninterrupted by my body's need for that contact with his warmth and weight to ease me back into restfulness.

I let go of that thought to focus on doing the work at hand. I tell my body, "Breathe in slowly. Breathe out slowly. Let go." But my mind interrupts itself, "What am I anxious about?" I come up with nothing. No cause, just the feeling. Not even an emotion, just a body sensation. So I conclude it is my fire energy again raging out of balance. Mental note: "make an appointment for acupuncture, soon."

Through half-open lids, I notice the red 4:23 AM. "Shit. Too early. Go back to sleep." Several more twists, squirms, and unsuccessful attempts to build the perfect pillow fortress against wakefulness, and I give up.

I struggle to sit, to stand, to trudge to the bathroom. My bleary attention stumbles into the still dark day. I shower, get dressed, make coffee, and prepare to meditate, arranging my legs on the old couch that looks out on the terrace.

Almost immediately, I am lured off my carefully organized sitting. The small candle I lit in its clear cup still holds its sacred anchoring place on the coffee table alter. But the bubbling call of a mockingbird outside my window seduces my ears. I don't resist it's invitation, and decide to interrupt my sitting "for a moment, only a moment," I tell myself, "only long enough to open the window and allow the predawn birdsong deeper access to my inside realm."

I unfold myself and open the window just enough to let song in without letting too much warmth out. It is supposed to be winter, although this February warm spell is already awakening spring flowers in our gardens.

Sensory temptation wins. I open the door and lay my standing body belly first into the cool spring dampness. Without another thought, I pull on my sweater, wrap a warm scarf around my neck, shuffle into my fleece jacket, and pad out onto the terrace. The green smell of spring surrounds me, and I am suddenly happy. "Who cares about a churning belly, when breathing is like this?"

I stand there a moment, unsteady and sense-drunk, not knowing what comes next. I wonder, "Should I risk wet socks to brave the dark lawn? Can I be satisfied with a few gulps of freshness, then return to my protected observation post inside?"

The choice my body makes becomes apparent when I slide onto the tattered old terrace sofa, a place I think of as my summer perch, and prepare to return to meditation. Pulling the faded outdoor blanket up around my now refolded legs proves an adequate barrier against the penetrating chill. A big pillow tucked behind my back supports my alert sitting. In one final adjustment, I tug my jacket sleeves down around my fingers before laying them softly in my lap.

Then, as if an unseen conductor has raised Her baton to command the chorus' attention, there is a momentary hush. I stop my breath, and like a parent thrusting out a hand to stop a child from dashing into traffic, I spread my hands. The low light reveals little of the lawn and shrubs. Even the cherry trees in their pale pink profusion--almost blindingly bright in daylight--are still a silent grey blur at this hour. It seems that the day is waiting for the downbeat. "Is Mother Nature herself surprised to be presenting this concerto, so early in the year?"

Then it begins. A solo from the mockingbird--its opening passages careful, separate, distinct, as if to insist that I pay special attention to each one; each one a simple imitation and its repetition. I cannot see the vocalist, although by the proximity of his voice, I know he must be perched on top of the holly bush twenty yards away.

Those first notes are joined seconds later by jubilant chattering house finches. The staccato scree of a jay gives some rhythmic structure to this beginning. With a nod to the Queen of the Night, a song sparrow warbles a luxurious phrase and bounces his ascending and descending coloratura with unerring accuracy.

"I'm in musical heaven," I think. My inner pleasure stretches my heart into a wide, silent grin. I have to refrain from laughing my joy out loud. I do not want to disturb the players nor the performance with any sound that would betray my presence. My body becomes content to just sit--the ball of churning in my gut, bristling with fortification, begins washing away in waves of inhale and exhale, leaving eventually only a smoothly undulating sensory-emotional diaphragm.

All around these solo voices, ("as if that weren't enough," I chuckle-think to myself) the volume and density of sound increases. A growing cacophony of distant chorus members begin their diverse morning songs simultaneously, and the sonic background fills in. A breeze in the garden perks up the neighbor's wind chime to fill in a few pitches the birds have somehow missed. The deafening chorus is punctuated only by the raspy cawing of a crow from the top of a walnut tree.

Then a trilling of tree frogs sustains two pitches a perfect third apart. This miracle bursts my heart. And to these two pitches, all the other fluty yodelers begin to tune themselves.

"The climax of John Adam's exultant symphony, Dawn Over Water can't compare," I think, "with this morning's avian rendition of Dawn Over Lawn." It is that full, and that rich, and by now, very loud. It fills my ears and surrounds my skin. I close my eyes, inhale deeply, and give my full attention to listening. No thought. Finally. Just sound.

My listening floats far out into that sea of sound. I slip under the surface but do not drown. Rather, my chest pulls in an oxygen-rich volume and releases a wave of tingly effervescence through my skin.

At the end of a long exhale, I am now finally present with the first tender sensation at the origin of my inhale, a soft letting go around my middle.

The voice of Emily Conrad echoes in my mind. "Participate with it. Invite it to spread without predetermined pattern." Unsure of this new freedom, my belly tentatively softens forward first, then also back into the cave of my sacrum. The exhale from way back there is a relief to my brain work.

"Sink below the regular in and out patterning to calm your thinking." My mind rests there for half a dozen breaths, or longer. I do not count.

Sensation bleeds out into the surrounding tissue, watercolor into parchment. Jaw softens, nostrils flare, sinuses widen, ribs and spine receive permission to ooze horizontally, diagonally, no longer straining upward.

"How have I learned to transmute the smell of crisp air and sound of birdsong into body bliss?" I begin thinking, again, this time a revery on my first difficult Continuum Movement workshop with Emily. Slowing down my movement so much to be able to attend to the details of sensation also slowed down my digestion, leaving me severely constipated for five days. I hated Continuum then, and determined not to return to that investigation ever again. But a month later, when that same detailed participation with purely pleasurable fluid movement arose on its own one morning in meditation, I felt the bliss. From that moment, I was hooked. More than three decades later, now, not a day goes by that my body does not find moments of sweetness or ease in the micro-movements of my amazing body, this fluid organism that evolved out of the sea.

Emily’s voice in my head, again. "To be alive is to be in motion. To know that experientially, slow your attention down, tune into the exquisite joy of your living, breathing, vibrating cellular nature. Participate with each sensation. Invite it to 'complexify'. Enrich each subtle drift, or float, or sink. Live fully in your fluid body. Increase your capacity for life as orgasm."

A piercing sound interrupts my reminiscence. The introduction of a new instrument? Threading its way through the concerto, a distant ambulance sirens--a rising and falling whine--a passionate plea for passage on some far off road crossing. I smile, unfazed. Only delighted and astonished at the cleverness of this weaving of manmade sound into nature's concerto. A minute later, the ambulance repeats its insistent request from a slightly different angle as it races to its urgent destination.

I wait, and wonder if I will hear it again, but after many minutes more, this treble symphony of birds, frogs, and wind chimes is joined by a deep, grumbling bass that shakes the ground. The tenor of a horn confirms the approach of a train on the tracks that run behind our building. This rumbling soon fills the lower registers, although never as densely as the birdsong fills the upper ones.

Above the din of crawling train and chorus of avian erotic craving, the mockingbird insists now on reclaiming his role as soloist. His voice grows suddenly louder as he flies to a perch directly above me in the serviceberry trees to renew his virtuoso performance. Even if only gaudy acrobatic mimicry, each cadence is repeated precisely, as if to be sure I notice, from my terrace box seat, that the pyrotechnics are not mere happenstance. And I do notice. And I notice that my mind is noticing.

With eyelids half open, a sudden flop of movement in the bottom corner of my gaze startles me. I blink several times to clear my vision, then open my field of vision, resting my focus on everything and nothing.

All is still. My ears are full of the awakening world's concerto, but there is no movement in the shades of gray.

"No. Wait. There it is again." My resident toad, the one who hides all day under the couch I am sitting on, has hopped out from under me.

"Hello, Mr. Toad."

I watch his next unstable, bowlegged amble toward the flowerpots at the edge of the terrace. "What got you up so early?" Then realize that he must have been disturbed by the center of the ceiling of his home bowing under my weight. I watch till he disappears off the edge to my right. Then close my eyes again for another huge auditory gulp from the sea of sound.

My body moves slightly and I am flooded again with recall. It's 1984 again. I am alive with my body learning, and my body teaching me to listen. I am again at the beginning of embracing daily practices that awaken all my energetic and physiological humanness. I am again weaving my body's inner mobility with more reliable emotional stability.

With the wondrous concerto still ringing in my ears, and the rich aliveness now filling my ribs and shoulders and neck, I let my eyelids flicker open again. The presence of color where there were only shades of grey before surprises me. The world, like my body, is now full of richness and radiant glow.

I am still absorbing the colors, when movement, on the left edge of the terrace catches my eye. Then nothing. Was it a sparrow hopping to the next spilled seed under the feeder? But there is no further movement. So my gaze softens and my attention retreats back to the continuing floating feeling at my occiput, now floating in color as well as sound.

Then the movement again, but my eyes see nothing where the movement was. My body stills, and on the next breath I angle my head that direction, to see around my nose with both eyes.

There it is again. The gray lump appears for a 10th of a second above the edge of the concrete slab. Then disappears behind it. "Mr. Toad! Do you patrol the perimeter of my terrace every morning? Are you responsible for a reduced population of crickets?" I smile.

I blink and breathe deeply again, this time catching a faint floral scent. I float my head further around to the left, without strain, not disturbing my body's ease. Against the backdrop of cherry trees, my now detailed attention slinks through the small forest of pearly pink hyacinth that bloom in a pot by the door. With the first rays of sunlight, they have begun to exude their sweetness around them, and my now awake senses pick up the first waft.

Although I do not want to disturb any of this, my body fidgets. "I will not sit here any longer.” My aching muscles have been in this one position, and in the cold too long, even with the subtle flow that's blissing me out.

So I rise slowly, unfolding my stiff legs and arthritic back. "Wouldn't it be polite to give a standing ovation right about now?" my heart wants to know. "Shouldn't I cheer, and yell bravo, for such a stellar performance?"

But I keep quiet, and gather my praise into me to savor for the rest of the day.