4 a.m.: A softly insistent "Hush ..."

It was 4:00 a.m. in the morning, and the night which surrounded me held a kind of hollow beauty that, when I tried to describe it, pulled away my words like it pulled away my very voice. I considered stabbing the stillness with a quick scream, but the dark sky, pierced from below by the unrelenting city lights and from above by the promising stars, seemed to hover over me like a hand. A warning that I was not to make that kind of noise right then, at least not unnecessarily, and that if I did, the sky would snatch it up in it’s great hand and absorb it, possibly echoing a bit back to me just to show me how small I am really am. Funny, because as I walked down the middle of the neighborhood street I found that I felt uncommonly large. The width of the road from sidewalk to sidewalk is really such a small space of pavement. When walking in the middle of it in the hours before the dawn, I felt that clearly. A few strides from one curb and there I was at the one on the other side. Yet it doesn’t seem so short a distance in the daytime, when one is looking both ways for cars, hurrying across from one point of safety to the next. At night, I didn't have to hurry. I could stand and observe and simply be; large in the middle of the street, small against the sky, sometimes helpless but not hopeless.

In the houses around me, people were sleeping. Pets were sleeping. Machines and cars were still; a sort of mechanical sleep. The house I had just walked out of would soon be quiet, dark, and sleeping. My friends and I had said goodnight, though good morning would be more accurate, like the song from "Singin' In The Rain". We had stayed up late talking, joking, playing games, eating good food and watching a good movie. Yet each of us were quite ready for bed, and I was thankful that I had only a short drive home.

My shoes against the pavement was a sound that I felt the night did not approve. There's an old poem by A. A. Milne that goes, "Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers". It's a tender poem, one to be read in a quiet voice, almost reverently at the hush part. Yet one cannot help smiling at the rest of the poem as it relays a sweet and sometimes distracted child's prayer, as he squints through his fingers to see what he can see, then quickly asks God to bless each family member in turn. There at 4:00 a.m., I could imagine a softly insistent, or perhaps more cajoling, "Hush, hush ... whisper who dares." Certainly it wasn't a threat. It was a gentle statement made for everyone's good. "Hush ..." This is the time for quiet. The time for sleeping. Hush ...

I hated to get in my car and turn on my noisy engine. As I drove home, I cracked open the window. The night breeze caressed me and kept me focused on getting to my soft bed. I lingered a moment outside the front door. Finally I said goodnight to the night and hello to the new day. Both are connected, yet each are their own entities. When the earth rotates away from the sun, a new sort of world is created. Moonlight, starlight, darkness and quiet. Daylight reveals while the night rests and heals. Now hush, hush, hush ....