Breakfast in Paradise

I slept all the way to my alarm at 6am, which is somewhat unusual with the time difference, but an almost perfect execution of my MO for westbound transatlantic travel: ~2 hours of sleep on the plane, and then 5-6 (in this case, 6.5) hours here.  Even more unusual was my resisting the pull to blearily scroll through the iPhone (other than a quick check to see if Lydia had sent me a message overnight; she hadn’t, perhaps unconsciously knowing my intentions not to look at it).  Instead I got out of bed, opened the blinds to the still darkness over the construction site out the north window,¹ and retrieved from the fridge the bowl of oats and chia seeds and dates and cocoa and almond milk that I had stirred together the night before, loosely following a recipe from the latest Gwyneth Paltrow cookbook we bought on eBay.² 

Appropriate that the chapter of Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander that I read over breakfast talks about the dawn: “Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.  It is wide open.  The sword is taken away, but we do not know it; we are off ‘one to his farm and another to his merchandise.’  Lights on.  Clocks ticking.  Thermostats working.  Stoves cooking.  Electric shavers filling radios with static.  ‘Wisdom,’ cries the dawn deacon, but we do not attend.”

This followed a passage in which Merton describes the daybreak at his hermitage at Gesthemani: mainly the first cries of the waking birds, at “the most wonderful moment of the day…when creation in its innocence asks permission to ‘be’ once again.”  In my case, the role of the birds would be played by the construction workers, emerging from the darkness in neon safety vests, porting hardhats and lahge coffees from Dunkin’.  They’re here as part the tsunami of biotech gentrification which continues to crash tirelessly over this part of Cambridge, so they (and certainly I) would technically fall more on the side of merchandise than wisdom, in Merton’s terms.  Still, I also find this the most wonderful moment of the day, and in the rhythm of their walk and the hum and grind of the machines and the black/blue sky I think I still catch at least glimpse of paradise.    

¹ Both windows in this apartment face north, so probably a useless qualification

² I know how this sounds, but trust me her cookbooks are really good