The more I learn the less, I realize, I know. Today’s prompt from Tyrean Martinson’s book is another such case. I had never heard the line before nor had I heard of English Victorian writer Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. You might like to read up on this brilliant woman who was before her times in so many things – it’s surprising how little we know about some of those people who helped move our world to its modern values of equality and mindfulness. The above line is from a poem of Tonna’s, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and Ireland.
Now, I have no particle of Irish blood in me and I’m not Roman Catholic either. St. Patrick’s Day isn’t anything I celebrate. I’m a German Lutheran (which is so different from American Lutheranism!), if you want to know. So, my approach to the prompt is totally different.
There are two kinds of mornings that I have been long-cherishing in my life, one lies in the past, the other is returning annually. Let me tell you about either.
Long-cherished to me is equivalent with long-awaited. My wedding day contained such a morning. Anybody of you who ever married somebody may have felt similar. There had been preparations for this day. My husband and I had welcomed people we hadn’t seen in a while or even never met before. I had never met my mother-in-law and her best friend, for example, nor a wonderful mutual friend’s wife. We had moved furniture around my apartment in order to accommodate all the guests who would be at the registrar’s office with us and, later, all those who’d return with us from church. And now, the morning was dawning. The big day that would make our commitment official and change our lives so very much. It was a morning full of tender looks and words, of gifts, of bliss and anticipation, without any witnesses. It was a morning of silent promises before the agenda of hairdressers, florists, and caterers rolled off, before the checking off of the list of locations until the next day’s dawn. That morning …
There have been other morning’s that I have been cherishing for long. The morning of Christmas Eve will always hold a special magic for me. It certainly has to do with the wonderful traditions with which I grew up, an almost ritual agenda of that day that heightened anticipation of the distribution of presents so much as a little child. Later, though, as of about age eight or nine, my highlight definitely became the church service I have been attending meticulously on Christmas Eve ever since, except during the pandemic and last year when I was sick. But even then, I wasn’t robbed of the magic of wakening to this long-cherished morn. Because the spiritual had long replaced the material meaning. And thus, the magic has never disappeared, either.
Long-cherished morns … in the end, I am grateful to wake to EVERY morning. Theses morns are cherished in their own way, filled with anticipation and hope. But the long-cherished ones are those that define us, I guess. The morning of my wedding and the annual reminder of the source of my faith sound just perfect as a definition of me …
What are YOUR takes on “waking to a long-cherished morn”?
Caption
(Photo: Alexander Possingham @https://unsplash.com/)
Every morning I do 20 minutes of a single exersize. It’s called “getting out of bed.”
Getting out of bed is surely something some people would crave. You and I are lucky to be in this place to do so. One of my first gratitudes every morning ..