I am dreading these days.

[linda]

Avoid things unjoyful.
[cob cottage company]

For a long time, after I first moved away from home, waking up early in the morning filled me with an apprehension so absolute I can't even properly describe it. On days when I woke after the light had come, I was safe to get up and make tea, stand on the porch barefoot, absentmindedly leaf through the novel I was reading the night before while toast warmed in the oven. But on the days my eyes flickered open in the predawn still, in the black of my bedroom, I would lie there and listen to the long low note of the train whistle in the distance, still with grief.

I still don't know what I was mourning. In so many ways, there wasn't anything to mourn- only things to anticipate and dream and work for. And yet. When I woke up suddenly, for no reason, at the very end of the night, mourning is what I did. I had this unshakable sense that I'd tipped over some impassable precipice, and was now staring into the true meat of life- dark nights, cold mornings, lonely commutes to jobs that would ask for things I couldn't give.

I'd always been this way when thinking about what lies ahead- ecstatic, then gripped with dread. Not necessarily in that particular order. Or in any particular order at all. But on those cold Arizona mornings, with the dim beginning of a sunrise filtering through the aspen tree outside our window, it came to me with startling clarity that this was the future- I'd lived into it. There were no more formal barriers to my life as an independent adult. I wore the terror of this heavily, balanced on my collarbone, lodged in my throat.

My body has been growing and changing and aging in the years since those mornings. Now, strangely, I've begun waking up earlier as part of some sort of subterranean shift deep under my skin. I will lie in bed, my skin warm and the air cool against the back of my neck, and think about how different the darkness feels to me now- like a secret I'm in on, like a sanctuary I have privileged access to. It's as though I've entered back into joyful communion with the small girl I once was, the girl who snuck out of her bedroom with her sister, who pushed two chairs together in the dining room and crawled into this makeshift nest in the very earliest hours of the day to watch the sun rise. The girl who looked forward to beginnings. I have missed her over these days.

I guess my point is I want to depart from dread. I do. I want to shed it like a skin that no longer serves me. I want to push off from its shores and not look back. I don't want to fear the days that are so delightfully unfinished, humming with all the complexity and possibility of a life. I don't want to judge myself against a background I can't yet imagine. I don't want to handle my life- my life!- with the dark side of my imagination, the side that looks for all that will go wrong, all the ways I will fail, the side that imagines me on my deathbed gripped with regret. Anxiety and her silent sister, Depression, have sidled up to many in my family line. I want to brew them some sun tea and send them on their way.

I want to think even more about the things I have been thinking about lately- things like community, and what it means to live in one. True partnership, and what that looks like. How to build a home, and what to take with you, and what to leave behind.

As I move further into my twenties, I want to continue to rise early. I want to honor these slightly longer days with plans and dreams lived into well. I want to build my own tiny home, learn how to use my grandmother's sewing machine, place myself in the center of where I want my life to be. I want to explore more and more what it means to be a nurse, a midwife, a healer in a world with so many sharp edges. I want to learn languages of all kinds, allow myself to tend towards silence on some days and song on others. I look forward to these things with something that feels exactly like joy. There's so much to do, and the day is just beginning.