I’ve been getting up early in the morning to write. And I like it.
This is big. Really big. I’ve been a nite owl–thought to be incurable–for nearly all my life.
I never knew I could be the kind of person to enjoy mornings so much, but I do. I love the morning now. I love being awake before everyone else and doing my own thing for a spell.
More specifically, I like the feeling of purpose that getting up to write gives me. I have so many words–oh so many–and I want them live somewhere. So getting up to write gives me that sense of honoring myself by giving my words a place to exist, to be free, to have their day in the sun. Well, not literally in the sun because the sun isn’t out yet. It’s just an expression, you know?
I’m working to add other times during my day to write too because, like I say–oh so many words. I have stories and prose and poems and songs that all clamor to emerge to the light, and I’m committed to giving them each their day.
I don’t know if I could enumerate all the works I have considered writing. Even those I have determined I will certainly write is a vast number. Oh so many words, and oh so many works.
There’s a hymn called, “How Great Thou Art,” that has a line that says, “When I in awesome wonder, consider all the works thy hand hath made…” (emphasis mine). And in the hymnal I grew up using, there was an asterisk by “works,” that led to a note, saying, “or worlds.”
I’ve always had a little fascination with this, but never researched it. Somehow I’ve just always intuited that it makes sense that these could be interchangeable because a big part of God’s work is that of creating worlds. Noteworthy too is that God used words to speak worlds into existence.
I told someone on a recent evening that I was getting up early the next morning. They asked me whether I had to work. Without stopping to explain that I would be writing and I was between paid gigs, I simply said, “yes.” It felt good to recognize my writing as work. I am, after all, creating worlds with my words.
Jennifer Clark Tinker 