Average Morning
I typically wake at five a.m. I open the front door and my dogs spill into the yard. I go to the kitchen, make a pot of tea and some form of breakfast; granola, toast, scrambled eggs or porridge. At some point the old Shitpig waddles in for his morning meds, he takes them eagerly as he knows he gets a biscuit immediately after, the Longdog hovers in the doorway all lurcher sketchy and gets one too. I bring my breakfast to my desk and sit down at the computer. It comes alive the home-screen with its familiar semi-organised chaos; individual files for certain things, “website pictures”, “plant lists”, “hort course”, “Business files”, “Writing”, “projects”. There are a scattering of jpeg photo files for a talk I’m trying to put together and other permanent ones I keep on the desktop; a geological map of Waterford soil types, a USDA hardiness zone graph. There are a handful of digital sticky notes too with various “important” information on; ideas for stories, plant names, THINGS TO DO, words I like.
Sometimes I sit at my desk, eat my breakfast and write. Other times I sit and open up the photos and pour through them remembering moments, physically transporting myself back to be among favourite people, places, once again inhabiting landscapes, emotions and the hopes of the time. Sometimes I sit and do this on my blog.
The rain has started again now. The front door remains open to allow the first grey-tones of dawn sift in. I think about the last couple of years and their sort of chronic drip-feed of low-key personal trauma. I think of the state of the planet, the chaos fraying the edges, the good humans trying to raise their soft voices over the deafening and cerebrally infuriating drone of rancid bullshit. I wonder how humans have lost the capacity to understand we’re a single species. I wonder why bad shit happens to good people and how actually there is literally no justice. I wonder how much the fall of society is going to hurt and I try to cherish every second of my mundane morning ritual aware that a split second either way at any given second today might be the difference between this and something else.
