The Early Hours

I'm not really into poetry, but this one, not just caught my eye.... guess it tugged somewhere deeper within, and that's why it's here.

Also as preface is Maria Papova's beautiful introduction :

“The most regretful people on earth,” Mary Oliver wrote in her beautiful reflection on the central commitment of the creative life, “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” 

There is something lovely about this notion of giving time — a generous counterpoint to our culture of taking time, snatching it from the river of being, with the fist of disciplined demand, only to see it slip through. The discipline of showing up is an absolutely necessary condition for all creative work, yes, but it is not a sufficient one. 

Sometimes — often — we show up, only to find nothing happens. Whatever it is we are showing up for — art, love — cannot be willed, cannot be wrested from the hour or the soul. We learn then that the work is the work, but the work is also the waiting — the exasperation, the surrender to despair, and the swell of joy on the other side of the surrender.

THE EARLY HOURS

by Adam Zagajewski

The early hours of morning; you still aren’t writing

(rather you aren’t even trying), you just read lazily.

Everything is idle, quiet, full, as if

it were a gift from the muse of sluggishness,

just as earlier, in childhood, on vacations, when a colored

map was slowly scrutinized before a trip, a map

promising so much, deep ponds in the forest

like glittering butterfly eyes, mountain meadows drowning

sharp grass;

or the moment before sleep, when no dreams have appeared,

but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world,

their march, their pilgrimage, their vigil at the sickbed

(grown sick of wakefulness), and the quickening among medieval

figures

compressed in endless stasis over the cathedral;

the early hours of morning silence

— you still aren’t writing,

you still understand so much.

Joy is close.