I did not plan my morning ritual. It found me — piece by piece, season by season — and now I cannot imagine starting a day any other way.
Before I do anything else — before the dogs, before the drinking chocolate, before a single word is spoken to another living soul — I lie in the quiet and look up and out.
Our bedroom has an arched window above the French doors, and in the early morning it frames whatever the sky is doing. Most mornings it is still dark and what I see is the pale beginning of light, or the dark outline of the pines against something slightly less dark. I lie there and I breathe and I just look. Some mornings that lasts two minutes. Some mornings it lasts twenty. I watch, think and maybe even pray but more often than not I just look and enjoy the quiet, sights, sounds and wait for the light.
Then I steal out of bed — and here is the part that might surprise you, given everything you have been told about phones in the morning. I go back for mine. Not to check anything. Not to see what arrived while I was sleeping. I pick it up because it’s a new morning and I want to catch it before it is gone.
There is something magical about a world in the middle of waking up. The early light through pine trees is not the same at seven as it is at six-fifteen, and by eight it is something else entirely. If there is mist, it will not last. If a cardinal has landed at the bird bath at exactly the right angle with the morning sun on his wings, that is a thirty-second window and then it is over. So yes, I reach for the phone — I reach for it as a camera, which is a completely different thing from reaching for it as a portal to everything the world has decided needs my attention right now.
Then I pad down the hall and stop at the front window to check on the circle. Are there deer out there, moving through the early quiet before the neighborhood wakes? Is there any color showing yet in the wildflowers — something opened overnight that was not there yesterday? And the bird bath — is anyone already at it, doing their morning ablutions or are there one or two birds simply splashing around?
Most mornings there is something. A doe at the edge of the grass. A dove. One perfect new bloom. Light so beautiful it takes your breath away and you think to yourself even if I take a photo it will not capture how beautiful this is. It takes thirty seconds and it costs nothing and it is one of the best thirty seconds of my day.
Then I head to the kitchen to make the drinking chocolate.
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It Was Not Always Like This
My mornings have had several lives. I think that is true of most women who have moved through different seasons and different places — the morning finds its shape around where you are and what you need.
In Florida, many mornings began at the beach. I would go early, before the world arrived, and walk along the water picking up shells, listening to the sound of it, watching the light come up over the Atlantic. The world feels very large and your own concerns feel very small. That is not a bad way to start a day. In Virginia, there was the paddle board in the warm months. I loved that — the birds, the little islands that appeared overnight as if the water had shifted while you were sleeping, the particular quiet of moving across something that wide and that still. We have revived the paddles here in North Carolina, but on a lake now, which has its own entirely different kind of beauty.
Then came the hot yoga years — six years of them. Up early and out the door, into a room heated to something that felt like a sauna. I loved it more than I expected to. There is a clarity that arrives after you have stood in a heated room and tried very hard for an hour. The mind goes quiet. Nothing else quite does that. My instructor was Jess, and she was the kind of teacher who makes the practice personal. On the mornings I really did not want to go — and there were mornings like that — it was almost as if I could feel and hear her calling me to get there. And every single time I went, it was exactly what I needed. That season of life needed that. The discipline, the heat, the guidance.
The move to North Carolina five years ago is what ended it — not the intention, but the reality of finding the right teacher in a new place. I tried. I could never find the one. And so the hot yoga became part of Virginia, the way the beach mornings became part of Florida, and I let it go and trusted that whatever came next would find me.
And what found me was this: the window, the circle, the drinking chocolate, the silver spoon, the porch, the dawn chorus.
I should tell you, though, that last week — with some gentle prodding from my sister — I went back to yoga. A new studio, a new instructor, no heat. Whether she is the one, I cannot tell you yet. That is still to be determined. But I notice that I am open to it in a way I was not a year ago, which perhaps means this season is ready for something more. We will see.
I did not design any of this. Each version of the morning evolved because the life needed it, and when the life changed, the morning changed with it. One day I looked at what remained and thought: yes. This is it. This is what I need right now.
The Drinking Chocolate and the Dachshunds
Not hot cocoa. Not a packet stirred into warm milk. Drinking chocolate — real drinking chocolate, made the way it was made in the Paris cafés I fell in love with decades ago, thick and dark and like nothing else. I have been drinking it this way for years and I will not be offering a lighter version. Somedays it goes into my French toile cup, white with blue, other days call for something whimsical, seasonal, or something else. You probably have a cup like that. The one that makes whatever is inside it taste slightly better than it would in anything else. If you do not have one, find one.
By the time the chocolate is made, someone has noticed.
Most mornings it is Patches who comes first. She sleep-walks in — there is no other way to describe it — padding into the kitchen with the unhurried dignity of a dachshund who has decided that wherever you are is exactly where she meant to be. She looks up at me with her big eyes and I let her out, and when she comes back in she gets her treat: a sweet potato bite, or a little whipped cream served on a silver spoon. A home version of a puppicino, if you will. She enjoys every lick.
And then Paris arrives. Because Paris has somehow, from wherever she was sleeping, registered that a treat is happening and she is not part of it, and that situation requires immediate correction. In she walks — slightly more purposeful than Patches, slightly more indignant — and the whole process starts again. Out, back in, silver spoon. There is a reason the morning takes as long as it does. Of course on early morning yoga days the chocolate waits until I get home but the rest of the routine is the same.
The Porch, the Journal, and the Dawn Chorus
In winter, we migrate to the Indigo Room — lamps and candles only, the fireplace on, the dogs arranged on their chair closest to the heat and burrowed into a pile of blankets. It is my favorite room at one of the best times of the day.
Lately, now that the mornings are warmer, I have been taking my chocolate to the front porch. And this is the part I want to tell you about, because I did not expect it to become the thing I look forward to most.
The dawn chorus. If you have never sat outside in the early morning and simply listened to the birds — not as background, but as the main event — I want to encourage you to try it and see what happens. The world is mostly still. The neighborhood has not started its day yet. And into that silence come the birds, layer by layer, until the air is full with a beautiful song.
The gratitude journal comes out here, or back inside depending on the morning. It is not complicated, there is no system. A notebook and a pen and three to five things I am grateful for on this particular day, written in my own handwriting. The easy mornings the list writes itself. The hard mornings I write down the chocolate and the quiet and the fact that the birds are still singing, and that is enough. Because some days it is hard to find the good, not that it isn’t there but our hearts and minds are hardened and hurt and simply can’t be open to it.
Prayer follows. What I pray and how long it takes is between me and God. What I will tell you is that the journal and the prayer, in that order, set something in the day that is very difficult to describe and very easy to feel the absence of. Which I do occasionally. And then I notice.
What the First Hour Actually Does
Here is what I have learned, over five years of mornings that look roughly the same: the first hour does not just start the day. It sets the frequency for everything that follows.
When I protect it — when the phone stays a camera and not a scroll, when the obligations wait and the first hour belongs entirely to the window and the circle and the chocolate and the journal and the birds — I am different for the rest of the day. Quieter. More patient. More capable of noticing the small things that make an ordinary day feel like something worth having.
When I do not — when the notifications arrive before the curtains are open, when someone else’s urgency gets there first — I spend the rest of the day trying to find my footing. Sometimes I do. Sometimes the day just goes that way.
The first hour is not selfish. I used to think it was, in the way women of a certain generation were taught to think that any time spent on themselves was time taken from someone who needed them more. But I have come to understand that the reverse is true. The woman who protects her morning is more present, more generous, more genuinely useful to the people in her life than the woman who starts the day at a deficit. You cannot pour from an empty cup — and yes, I know that is on approximately ten million mugs and signs, but it became a cliche because it is true.
Reinventing Your Morning Routine
I am not suggesting you copy my morning. Please don’t. The beach mornings were mine because in Florida I needed them and the siren song of the ocean was hard to resist. The yoga was mine because my body needed movement and Jess, and that particular season of life that needed discipline and heat and someone calling you toward something. The porch and the dawn chorus are mine now because this is where I am right now. Your morning needs to answer the question your life is actually asking. Not mine.
So here is the question I would ask you: what does your life need right now? Not what it needed five years ago. Not what the wellness industry says a morning should look like. What does yours need, in this season, in this place?
If your mornings currently belong to everyone else before they belong to you, start there. Not with a system. With one thing. The cup of something hot in the cup you love, before a single obligation is checked. Five minutes at a window before the house wakes up. Whatever costs nothing and takes almost no time and makes you feel, for just a few minutes, like the day is yours.
If you already have a morning practice but it has stopped feeling like yours — if you are going through the motions of something that served a previous season and no longer quite fits — that is worth paying attention to as well. The practice is not sacred. The intention behind it is. I kept yoga for six years because it was right, and I let it go because I had to. I did not replace it with something identical. I replaced it with something true. There is a difference.
And if you are somewhere in the middle — if you have pieces of a morning that work and pieces that are just habit and you are not sure which is which — try this. Tomorrow morning, before you do anything that is required of you, do one thing that is only for you. See how it feels. See what it tells you about what you actually need. The morning is surprisingly honest, if you give it a few minutes of your attention before you fill it up with everything else.
The rest will find its way in. That is what mine did — piece by piece, season by season, until one morning I was sitting on the front porch with my French toile cup and the dawn chorus was happening all around me and Patches was sitting on my lap and I thought: I would not trade this for anything.
I still think that. Every morning, more or less. Even the hard ones. Especially the hard ones.
Tell me about your morning — do you protect the first hour, or does it tend to disappear into everything else? I am genuinely curious what your version looks like. And if you are in the middle of reinventing it, I would love to know what you are trying.
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