Rise and Shine.

It’s morning. That undeniable fact is— well, undeniable. Your unopened eyes sense the presence of light. It’s as if someone hovers outside your door, waiting to knock. And then it does knock, does light, blazing into you the understanding that if you opened your eyes, there'd be no going back. Like it or not, you are awake. It is, indeed, morning.

But you lie there, wishing that it weren’t. You keep your eyes closed, your arms wrapped tightly around the pillow. You wish consciousness away.

Sleep slips out like the tide.

Hug the pillow though you might, pretending that its part of you, the part sailing in unconsciousness, keeping eyes closed with pure intention— you are awake. The day takes no refusal.

Someone elsewhere is making coffee and its fragrance calls to you like a siren.

The eyes—all on their own, they open. Traitors.

The pillow reminds you of its separate self.

In your bed, you are cast adrift. The flotsam and jetsam of dreams scatter, float off, irretrievable now.

And so you rise, and it’s a new day.

Like it or not.

Sorry I’ve been incommunicado. I’ve been drifting in such a holding pattern as those days when you just don't want to get out of bed.

Listing my Simple Ripping Qualities was a Rubik’s Cube. I’ll tell you about it later. It took some doing, organizing my thoughts on that topic.

And in the middle of that, a friend died. And that was, understandably, sad. (The good news is that my house has never been cleaner, as I've been dealing with grief by scrubbing the be-Jesus out of every surface. At the Vermont house, too.)

In this last month since I've posted, each day, I’d say, “Hey Cupcake, why don’t you blog or something?”

To which I’d answer myself, “Hey, Cupcake, sod off.”

Then, last week, I went away. I went to another country where I looked at a city I hadn't seen in a while. I walked streets where the chatter around me was in a language not my own, and frowned over calculating the cost of things in another currency.

But it was after an amazing lunch, sitting in a patch of sun stretched out through a restaurant window, that I sat drinking port and smoking cigars with an old friend, the sort of friend one knows well enough that the conversation can aspire to silence. We sat and sipped and puffed, and in that post-prandial tranquility, I clicked the final squares of the Rubik’s cube together.

So now I’m back.

And in the life of my blog, it’s a new morning. Rise and shine.