Like the first dewfall, on the first grass

Managed to drag myself out of bed nice and early this morning. At 6:45! The past couple of weeks, working at home, I've been waking up later and later each day, averaging a rise-and-shine time of around 9:30. Then again, I've been turning my lights out between 1 and 2 am each night, so it works out. I need at least 7 hours of sleep to feel rested. But then by the time I finish my breakfast and actually get started working on my thesis, it's already noon or a little past, so in all honesty, it really doesn't work out. So last night I rapped myself on the head and forced myself to get into bed by 11:30, and, as motivation to not just turn the alarm off and dive back under my blanket, promised myself that I would go for 7:30-am morning mass. Calmed my brain down with a little light reading about Galileo and Newton and gravitation (Morris Kline's "Mathematics and the Physical World"), and voila! Lights out at 00:05!

Well, I thought I had calmed myself down. Darkness or not, my brain just wouldn't shut down, and I tossed and turned through most of the night. I think I had about two periods of sleep, because I remember two sets of dreams. The rest of the time, visions of West-Coast-Swing YouTube videos danced in my head. Insomnia is something I've dealt with since I was 15, though, so although the whole thing annoyed the heck out of me, I didn't get too worked up about it. (Can't really say that I "didn't lose any sleep over it," though. That turn of phrase doesn't quite work here. Neither does "not losing any hair over it," especially given the haircut I had a couple of days ago that left me shorn nearly as closely as a Marine recruit.) Even if I wasn't actually sleeping, my body *was* getting some sort of rest, so it was OK.

5:26. So said the red LEDs. Sigh. Oh well, maybe I'll be able to fall asleep within the next hour and 15 minutes.

The alarm went off what felt like less than 20 minutes later. Damnit! Just when I thought I could feel true, blissful sleep coming on. Had I read the clock wrong earlier? Had it actually been *6*:26? It'd be ok if I went back to sleep, and started going to morning mass tomorrow instead, wouldn't it? After all, I'm allowed an adjustment period between waking up at 10:30 and waking up at 6:45, right? It's not natural to go cold-turkey from one to the other on consecutive days. Not good for the body.

Ach, whom am I kidding. I'm wide awake. Ain't gonna be any falling-back-to-sleep anyway. Quit being lazy, Jason. I just need to get myself into an upright position, and get my shoes on, and I'll be fine.

So I did, and I was indeed fine. Pulled open the blinds -- dawn hadn't quite broken yet, and the air was still still and heavy and humid in the darkness. The birds were just about starting up, too, while the crickets were winding down. Stumbled to the bathroom. Heidi's door was open, and her light on -- she was up already, working on her dissertation. She's an early riser. Light was shining under Brian's door, too. Good god, does *everyone* in this house normally get up this early? Oh well, he's an architect, and these architecture students are crazy. They work even harder than us engineers.

Fixed myself a bowl of porridge ("oatmeal", to you Yanks), and contemplated cycling to church vs. walking. I'd always cycled before, because I'd always carried on to school afterwards, lugging my heavy backpack around with me. But today I'd be coming back home, and no backpack either. Besides, when I cycle, it's all about speed and getting somewhere fast, and I wanted to take my time and enjoy the morning. Walking sets the mind free and allows it to wander as well. I read a great quote once, by this guy who used to go for walks for two to three hours on end. Some famous author or the other. Can't remember it now -- need to look it up again.

Ernest Hemingway, it might have been. Hmm...

So I walked, even though I knew it would make me a couple of minutes late. Got there during the First Reading -- was the story of Jonah, today. The Gospel was the story of the Good Samaritan. Nothing in The Word was terribly inspiring today, and indeed I spent quite a few minutes distracted by the dewy freshness of the trees just outside the window. But, like my Mama says, it's good to just touch base, so I contented myself with that, where normally I would have fretted about having wasted my time. Was nice to see Fr. George, the parish priest, again, too. Although I did get miffed -- again -- about people's habit of conversing loudly, *inside* the church, after the Mass gets over. Not in the least bit helpful to people, like myself, who just want a little quiet-time in a church to pray. That's precisely the reason why I'd rather go for the daily morning Mass at this neighbourhood church than for the Sunday Masses at the Catholic Student Center on campus. Over there, the minute the service is over, it gets noisier than a high-school cafeteria.

I finished reading C. S. Lewis' "The Case For Christianity" a little while ago (see also my second post in this blog). That guy is amazing. That little book, less than 60-odd pages long, answered a whole bunch of the questions I've been carrying around with me for years about Christian dogma -- things that just didn't make any logical sense to me, and so prevented me from believing [in] them. But Lewis dealt with those issues so deftly, it was almost like a sleight of hand. I need to go back and read that book again (and his other works, too). By the end of the book, I found myself thinking -- Is it all really that simple?! (The logical arguments, I mean, not the dogmas themselves.) His reasoning was so lucid and compelling, that I found myself led along until I was boxed into a corner where really, Christianity is The Answer, and there's a part of me that rebelled against that (the being led along by hypnotizingly powerful rhetoric) a little bit. It was all just too easy, too much like a magician's trick. I'm not denying that he could be right; I just want to go back and truly satisfy myself that he is, before committing myself.

And so, when it wasn't otherwise thinking about Jonah and fishes' bellies and Samaritans and dewy leaves, that's what my mind was reflecting on during the Mass: some of the things that Lewis had talked about. Fallen angels, free will, Incarnation and Resurrection... weighty stuff.

The walk back home was lovely. Saw some dogs, which always leaves me feeling happy. Detoured through a park, swung on a swing for a bit and grinned at how self-conscious I was feeling about playing, in public, on something meant for a 7-year-old (I really don't like the flexible-seat design that's so ubiquitous nowadays. My butt isn't shaped like a semi-circle, for pete's sake! Why don't they make them like they used to, with a nice flat plank for a seat?!), looked around and pictured what this entire grassy, wooded area would like in just a few months, covered in frost and ice and snow, and transformed into a winter wonderland... lay back on a park-bench and stared up through the tree-branches at the sky for a couple of minutes, before telling myself that I really needed to get up and get going and stop lazing around.

Further down the trail that I had to take on my way home, I saw a single leaf hovering in mid-air, at about eye-level, far away from any other structure. Although I couldn't see it until I walked around and looked at it from a different angle, I immediately knew how it was achieving that feat: it was suspended by a strand of spider-silk. I was still quite intrigued, though: it's normal to see a *spider* suspended at the end of a long thread like that. Not a *leaf*!

Earlier last week I had come running along that trail with my running buddy -- my football (soccer ball, to you, my American readers) -- and somewhere right around there it had spiked off my toe and gone bounding off into some bushes along the side. I had followed, to retrieve it, most trepidatiously, because that unkempt little area was precisely the kind of place where nasty things like poison ivy like to lurk, and, it being quite dark, I really couldn't see anything very clearly (it had been around 8 pm -- which made for dribbling a football along woodland trails quite an adventure, too). Oh, and my legs were quite bare and unprotected, of course. Anyway, I managed to snatch my ball out, and didn't break out into any sort of hideous rash, so it all turned out ok. So today, since it was all nice and bright, I decided to go and take a look at that thicket and see if there indeed was any poison ivy there. Ventured cautiously in, crouched down to bring my eyes down to shrub-level... and then I saw one little guy there, trademark trifoliate, asymmetric, palm-shaped leaves and all. A-ha! Wow, so I *had* been lucky! And then I looked up and around a little bit more, and realized just how lucky I had been: that entire area was actually *blanketed* in poison ivy, a huge, mature growth of it pushing through all the other plants there! I have *no* idea how I went in there and emerged unscathed! Do I really have greater resistence to poison ivy than most other people? Is this magnificent biological machine that is my body even more magnificent that I had imagined?! (Yes, I'm allowing myself a moment of vainglory here.) Well, even if it is, that is one hypothesis I'm not going to attempt testing. I don't mind ringing Fate's doorbell and running away once in a while, if I know I can get away with it, but it's not good to tempt her *too* much. ;)

Profoundly full of happiness at the experiences and discoveries of my early-morning walk, I continued on. I'd never have noticed all these things if I had cycled instead. Saw some lovely deep-pink (rose!) roses growing in a neighbour's garden. Waved out to people driving off to work. Heard a mockingbird sounding off from inside a bush (you can tell it's a mockingbird because its tune changes every few seconds), and was immediately reminded of Zooey Deschanel's hilarious performance in the movie "Failure to Launch" ("What the hell kind of devil bird chirps at night?!"). Got home, and Raja, Heidi's 10-year-old cat, was waiting right behind the front door (probably trying to figure out a way to get out. She's an inquisitive little thing.). She was in one of her inexplicably random (in other words, typically cat-like) frisky moods -- she scampered off down the hallway, and then back again, and leapt up onto the counter-top to have her ears scratched (It really amazes me, how much power these animals have in their legs, and especially at this age!), and I indulged her, and was rewarded with a happy purr. ... It had been a good morning. :) Good enough to inspire me to actually write about it. A porch/verandah, a deck chair, a mug of hot tea, a laptop and wireless networking, and a morning that stayed cool and pleasant the whole while. Let me say it again -- it's been a good morning.

Now, back to reviewing the literature on fenestron tail rotors and playing a different kind of author. ;)

P.S.: Thank you, Cat Stevens.