An Ode to a Magnificent Morning

Are you a morning person? I am an entirely morning person. I don’t need a blare of an alarm to wake up. I just wake up in the mornings.

Back home in India, it was cawing of a crow or fragrance of fresh flowers on my terrace garden that used to wake me up. Yeah I know I was blessed to have my room on the terrace! Years ago, I could hear the train whistling away in the dawn but now traffic noise has dimmed all other sounds.

Here, it’s no different. There is a beautiful tree at my window and its home to sparrows and finches. The melodious chirping of birds wakes me up every morning.

I find mornings glorious, calmer and shinier. Mornings are quiet and bare as probably half of the city is still sleeping. I see fewer people in the mornings, and that makes me calm and happier.

Mornings are divine, luminous and illuminated. Mornings symbolize the inner light, awakening, and knowledge.

Night symbolize inner darkness and ignorance. Mornings are the harbinger of truth and dispellers of all fear.

Nights are not way deficient and imperfect than mornings. I think night is the mother of the morning. When night gets impregnated by the fear, darkness, suffering, and death, it gives birth to a beautiful and a youthful morning.

Mornings are stored with substance and represent immortality. In fact, night and morning go around in a cosmic wheel and represent the continuity of universe.

With its golden hue, the rays of the morning bear the eternal wisdom, dynamism, and plentitudes.

In its wideness, it blends the harmony and serenity in its most splendid form.

There is a beautiful hymn dedicated to the goddess of the morning in Rig Veda known as Usha. She is one of the most celebrated Goddess in Rig Veda and is invoked as follows:

“The radiant Dawns have risen up for glory, in their white splendor like the waves of waters.
She maketh paths all easy, fair to travel, and, rich, hath shown herself benign and friendly”.

This is a hymn from Rig Veda translated by Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith

But now mornings in many cities across the globe are smoggy, hazy and polluted and the experts suggest to stay indoors even in mornings or keep nose and face covered.

This poem written by T.S. Eliot describes the modern urban life in London.

Morning at the Window

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs