Listening in the Turquoise Light of Dawn

A prayer.

Photo by Aron Gestsson on Unsplash

5:30 a.m.

The sun hasn’t risen yet, but I’m awakened by birdsong outside my bedroom windows. The murky, turquoise light of pre-dawn presses in around the shades. I sit up for a cup of water in the mostly dark.

As I emerge from the deepness of sleep, my husband snoring next to me, I notice that there are layers and new voices joining the birdsong. The notes are complex, beautiful, arresting.

Since it’s springtime and I love fresh air, we’ve got the second-floor windows cracked open, and since the night air was cold after several days of rain, our radiators have turned on and are now hissing faintly with warmth.

This morning, and perhaps because I went to bed early last night, the birdsong is enough to wake me up. I go to the windows in another room where there aren’t any shades hung, and look out directly over our front yard. I see a neighborhood of homes and trees adrift in shadow, spreading out before me, and in the distance a sparkling of orange and white lights, and beyond that, a faint, low mountain range. We are facing west and our new home is on a small mountainside looking out over a valley. I suddenly notice a deer walking at the bottom of our front lawn, eating our grass, putting one hoof in front of the other as she walks along our cement sidewalk. She stops for a moment and looks up. She is a beautiful doe.

I hear a clear trilling note, followed by a warbling response, and then I realize there are layers to this call and response—a symphony orchestra at play here in our small, suburban mountainside habitat in New Jersey. This week is significant for our family, because it is the first few days of living in our new home after spending over six months in a cramped apartment with our two kids and dogs. We lived there after we returned to the east coast from Washington state, last fall.

In our apartment, early mornings were punctuated by the sound of delivery vans, garbage trucks backing up, cars racing in and out of the parking lot outside our window, and the dull and distant roar of the highway a few blocks away, which was even louder in the winter when there weren’t any leaves on the trees. My neighbors upstairs walked around at all hours of the night, so we heard footsteps above our bedrooms regularly. Living in the apartment makes me appreciate the quietness and space of our house.

This morning’s birdsong stirs a deep sense of peace and renewal inside me. It also reminds me that there are other languages that contribute to the symphony of God’s Creation, outside of my own.

I pray that you would feel Christ’s presence today.

Amen.

“How clearly the sky reveals God's glory! How plainly it shows what he has done!” -Psalm 19:1 (Good News Translation)