I, a late riser, fantasise about getting up every morning at 5 A.M. to fetch the horses in from the fields.
A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.
I get up at sunrise. I'm a Buddhist, so I chant in the morning. My wife and I sit and have coffee together, but then it's list-making time. I have carpentry projects. We have roads we keep in repair. It's not back-breaking, but it's certainly aerobic and mildly strenuous.
When I was four, we moved to a farm outside Springfield, Missouri. We had a radio show from that farmhouse. My dad always wanted a farm. We used to go out and milk the cows every morning and then do a radio show with a remote control from our living room. We'd start by singing 'Keep On The Sunny Side.'
It was a small farm in a little rural town by the Indiana state border. I lived there from ages 5 to 12, I would say, before we moved to Dallas. We had chickens and a vegetable garden, and I had to get up to milk the goats at seven in the morning or do it at seven at night.
I usually start my day when my kids wake up.
How troublesome is day! It calls us from our sleep away; It bids us from our pleasant dreams awake, And sends us forth to keep or break Our promises to pay. How troublesome is day!
Getting up at four in the morning to tend the farm while the world is quiet - feeding animals, mucking stalls, gathering eggs, filling water troughs, checking fences, letting animals out into the field - is a high point to my day.
I don't make my bed. At the end of a day of going to construction sites, the last thing I want to do is move 10 pillows off the bed.
