Gwen Meharg, www.drawneartogod.com

I woke in thick layers of dreams. One long slow cup of strong black tea later, and I felt my brain turn on at last. It hovers beside me and does my dirty work. It runs through my to-do list while the rest of me purrs inside the gently falling snow.

I try to still it, to bring its focus to the calm morning and the dog beside me at my hip. It hovers for a minute before heading out to give an ongoing a.m. radio report of all that’s in store for me on this fine April day.

My brain and I come together here on this page with the relief of someone suturing together my abdomen.

Birds flock to their food source—our neighbor Arlette’s front yard filled with seeds and suet. They fall and rise in geometric patterns. They fall in a triangle, as likely for a dive, but their rise is a rectangular sheet of small black sliding cookies.

Together as they fall, fanning out as they rise, they seem rarely still. Yet they must sleep on their boughs, the way I slept in my bed, finding nourishment there.

Oh, gentle life, I come to you gradually today, like someone’s turning on the sun. I resist. And yet there is my belly. My shoulders hunch a bit. My feet in colorful wool socks perch like the birds in my soft inside sandals. I don’t know that I am up for the day. Yet I report to you, sweet present moment, breathing with all I am and all I am not. I fear the guillotine’s fall for no reason other than that I stand here so vulnerably. I smile at you in my fear. I’m tired. I don’t know if I can keep going anymore.

Oh, is that all? Life asks, smiling wide. Of course you can.

So I shrug and sip my tea, and offer my life the best of me. Some days it seems meager. But it is all I have. Thank you, for offering me up as I am, and for receiving it, too. It’s unbearably sweet, this tenderness. I pull away from it to hide once again in my superego brain, watching as though mighty, from above. Yet I feel worse there, more distant and separate. And my might feels flimsy.

I prefer the softest smallness to 1,000 leagues of breadth.

Last night, I dreamt that a woman who was me fell out of an airplane and landed in the snow like an avalanche in the driveway of our old house on 10th St. I was part of the rescue. I said, “We have to hurt her!” That meant find her and touch her frozen fingers and bring her back to the air and light from her sudden tomb of numb cold.

This morning, I’ve retreated to numbness. However that unbearable tenderness is where I’d prefer to dwell.

Ah, well, tough gal. We’ll do our day together, longing to thaw even though it will hurt.