In the morning, the wattle birds wake me. It's a rude awakening - when God gave Australian birds song, she was in a bad mood, and made them all squawk like they were in a bad mood too. The wattle bird song is clipped, loud, scratchy, and slightly unhinged. Sometimes there's a thump - that's the roos on their way down to the river. It's soft, like the earth opens for their long feet, lets them go again. The magpie too escaped the earth-God's bitchiness, and has a liquid carol that is pure delight, the song I miss the most when I'm off country. Ravens, oft mislabelled crows, join in - deep, rolling croaks.
My room isn't entirely empty, but it's very simple - I have one small picture of a shack amongst a mushroom forest reminding me of how little I need, and a Bill Callahan post with a horse in a field and the words 'sometimes I wish we were an eagle'. There's something about that phrase that has always charmed me. A sense of oneness, perhaps, of unity. Of soaring above the hard, dry earth and into the soft sky.
I've been trying not to wake and reach for my phone. I know what the time is - it's early, as I always wake early, unless I'm ill or fatigued or drugged up on painkillers with a migraine. I like the liquidity of dawn, the lanquidness of it - it's the most precious minutes of the day. I like to stretch out in bed, unfurl my limbs, rest into the spaciousness of these precious minutes when I am alone, unbothered by things to do, texts and phonecalls, the washing to do, chickens to feed, shopping, and all the lists we make to fill our days.
I'm not sure I'm thinking really or planning at this time. I'm not even really doing - it's a true moment of just being. One minute, ten. All the same. As long as I can rest in this infinity for a moment I think my day starts better. An old Hive friend was musing this week about how time is going slower for him at the moment. For me, it's quickening, perhaps because I feel I'm rushing to the year of my death like my father did to his - his death a reminder of my own mortality. The years are sliding. Some say time goes slower when you're old because the days are not taken up with new things. I disagree. I clasp onto every minute when I have a handle on my own 'being awareness' - when I can resist the idiocy of time wasting online.
These stolen minutes, coupled with occasional daydreams staring out to sea or into the gum tree in the front garden - are as close as I get to a minimalist ritual as I get. And if I'm lucky, little revelations come - solutions to problems, creative ideas, poetry. Sometimes nothing, which can be even more delicious. A calm mind is fucking awesome.
I sleep in a room next to my husbands, but not with him. He'll sleep until I crawl into the cup of his body, where he'll kiss my shoulder and tell me he loves me so much, because he's not properly awake yet and his defences are down. If he's not properly awake, I'll wake him - coffee is his self appointed job, and I've learnt that if you make a bad coffee in the morning, someone else will do it forevermore. Besides, he takes it as his husbandly duty. We don't get out of bed til that first coffee. Twenty two years. I hate it if I sleep in and miss that snuggle and the coffee - occasionally, I will, and he's already in the shower off to work and it doesn't feel right.
How fucking lucky are we, we usually say, listening to the ocean, the giggle chicken kookaburras starting up, the delicate and sky pip of king parrots, the higher black cockatoos kee-owing, mournful. The things that make us happy - oh! - so simple!
We talk for a bit, riff ideas of things-to-do-today, priorities, projects. We are do-ers. Once the day has begun and the coffee's running in our veins, we never find that morning peace again, not til the next dawn anyway.
This post was written in response to the Minimalist community's KISS prompt - in a single room stripped to its essence, choose one essential ritual—like brewing tea or journaling—that anchors your day. Write a 300+ word personal story exploring how this ritual, free from clutter and distraction, reshapes your perception of time, deepens self-awareness, and reveals hidden layers of contentment. What subtle shifts in thought or habit arise from this simplicity, and how does it redefine "enough" for you?
With Love,
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Those are beautiful sounds to wake up to, screeching or not, they're nature. What I'd hate about your routine is getting out of bed - that's so difficult, especially in winter - in order to drag yourself over to the next room.
As to the phone, I never take it into my bedroom. Mornings are the only time I can detox and stay be away from my phone for a while till after breakfast