Photo by Melanie

Living Madly: Enchanted Dawn

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

For most of my life, I didn’t consider myself a morning person. Getting up before seven o’clock always felt like work, a sentiment that was reinforced when my daughter was a toddler. She refused to sleep later than five a.m. no matter what time she had gone to bed.

Five years ago, when my husband and I began hiking in the White Mountains on a regular basis, we started getting up before sunrise most weekend mornings—sometimes as early as three a.m. during the COVID-19 lockdown—in order to find parking at trailheads. Factoring in the two- to three-hour drive and the length of our planned hike, we usually try to be on the trail between seven and eight in the morning in order to have time to make it back to the car before dark.

Even though I don’t have to commute, getting out of bed before six o’clock has become something of a habit. I don’t use an alarm clock. This time of year, when the sun is up before five, I’m often awake at first light.

There’s something magical about being up very early in the morning. With the exception of the birds, it’s almost always quiet. I sometimes spot brown bats flying back to their nests. I’ve seen foxes drinking from our birdbaths, and, once, an opossum relaxing on top of the retaining wall behind our house. There are almost always rabbits.

In the summer, I make coffee and sit on our screen porch. Sometimes, I read or make notes. Most of the time, I do nothing. The peace and solitude are restorative, replenishing my strength so I can face whatever tasks or challenges lie ahead.

I especially enjoy getting up early on our days off. Recently, on a weekend trip to the mountains, I got up at five o’clock and sat outside. No cars were on the road; no one was out jogging or walking their dog. I watched hummingbirds and butterflies sip nectar from wildflowers. Three different kinds of dragonflies zipped and hovered above a dew-covered garden.

The peace and quiet at this time of day help me think more clearly than I usually can. Solutions to problems sometimes come to me out of nowhere, recent conundrums suddenly obvious. Some of my best ideas have materialized in the hours just after dawn.

Being up and about before everyone else sometimes reminds me of being a kid. I was often the first one awake on our summer vacations to the Maine coast. Careful not to wake my sister, I’d get dressed and go outside to look at the ocean. I’d sit there for an hour or more, watching the waves crash onto the rocks, before hearing anyone stir.

One of the things that motivates me to get out of bed so early is that the quiet is short-lived. The peace is quickly overcome by commuter traffic, school buses, lawn mowers. Our cellphones buzz with text messages. The weather report, or worse, the news, comes over the radio. Calendars and to-do lists beckon.

I’m not religious in any traditional sense. But I think heaven, if it were to exist, would be an eternal early morning, full of birdsong and swaying grass, drowsy bumble bees covered in fresh pollen, the whole world bathed in the soft light of daybreak.

The ancient Celts believed dawn was one of the “thin times,” a threshold where, if one knew where to look, a doorway between the worlds could be found. Heaven and earth, the living and the dead, past and present, day and night, were close to one another, the boundaries between them blurred.

There’s some truth to this idea. For a short time after sunrise, I can sit in one place while looking straight through into another. I think the magic I sense at this time of day, the answers and discoveries I often find, come from being in the liminal space between sleeping and waking, where logic can’t overrule vision and responsibilities don’t interfere with rest. It’s too early to make breakfast, too late to sleep, but if I close my eyes, I can still sometimes dream.

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Emilie-Noelle Provost (she/her). Author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award and American Fiction Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Visit me at emilienoelleprovost.com.