(Thoughts from chapter eleven, Things We’ve Handed Down: Twelve Letters I Leave for You, based on the book, Why I Wake Early, by Mary Oliver.)
Everything important doesn’t begin with a shout. Some begin with a whisper. A slow inhale. A quiet light spreading across the edges of the sky.
That’s why I wake early.
Not to conquer the day. Not to crush the checklist. To listen. To watch. To breathe. To write. To pray. To read.
Mary Oliver—one of the voices that’s walked with me through the years—taught me to live this way. Not in the rush of noise, but in the hush of wonder. Not in a race to be efficient, but in a rhythm to be fully alive.
Life, she reminds us, is more like a poem than a program. It doesn’t always rhyme. It rarely sticks to a straight line. It wanders. It wonders. It surprises.
And in chapter eleven of Things We’ve Handed Down, I wanted to say what Mary helped me see: That this life God has given us isn’t something we master. It’s something we receive. It’s a sacred unfolding.
We crave clarity. God gives us mystery.
We want structure. He gives us rhythm.
We want control. He offers poetry.
And like poetry, our days have pace and pause, verses of joy, stanzas of sorrow, turns that feel strange but lead to beauty.
This is what I’ve been handed down, what you’ve been handed down, what we’ve been handed down. A life not of formulas and fixes, but of grace and healing and redemption. Flowing like a poem written by divine hands.
This is why I wake early. To remember. To notice. To begin again with the rhythm of the Spirit, not the rhythm of the world.
You don’t have to be a poet to live this way. You just have to pay attention. To open your eyes before the noise starts. To believe that God is writing something sacred, even in the silence.
So maybe tomorrow morning—just once—wake early.
Let the light speak before your phone does.
Let the silence say more than your schedule.
Let the rhythm of grace find its way into your soul.
And maybe, like Mary, and like me, you’ll find that the best way to live is to rise with wonder and walk into the poem already being written.
