Good morning.
Chögyam Trungpa often began his talks with that salutation. Regardless of the hour, he would hold his golden fan open and proclaim “Good Morning.” Even though he sometimes began his talks very late at night, there was no irony intended. He was inviting everyone to wake up.
Good morning.
Any moment can be a fresh start when we’re awake to greet it. This very moment, right in this moment, can be an invitation to open to life.
So much of our lives are lived sleepwalking. We move through our days inside protective cocoons of habit, belief, and repetition, until we stub a toe against reality. In recovery parlance we talk about “islands of clarity” – moments of awake when we see beyond ourselves with more perspective. Unfortunately, for most pre-enlightened beings, we fall back into our brown out almost instantly. The pull of our sleep is so very strong.
People say “wake up and smell the coffee”. But I can smell the coffee just fine from bed.
Dilgo Khyentse, Rinpoche said that the difference between the dreams we have at night and the dreams we walk through in life is duration. Dreams at night last mere seconds, despite the fact that they feel much longer. In the same way, our lives feel long and solid. In truth, our lives are startlingly brief. In fact, we are dying the moment we are born. Each moment of life ends and gives birth to the next. Yet, though we know life is short, we live as though we are permanent. We believe our pain is permanent. Our fear is permanent. Our identities are permanent.
We believe in the bubble.
We often live inside bubbles made of belief—sealed worlds of fixed assumptions about who we are, what is possible, and how long our suffering will last. Once we expand as far as we can within that enclosure, we begin to dull and atrophy.
Then something merciful happens. The bubble bursts. Fresh air rushes in. And for a moment, life feels miraculous. And what is a miracle if not the sudden rebirth from what seemed lifeless?
Yet so often we try to preserve that miracle, clutching it this is like someone opening a window for fresh air and then quickly shutting it so the freshness cannot escape. But rebirth is not a possession. It is a cycle.
Nature teaches this relentlessly: winter gives way to spring, death to life, ending to beginning. They are not opposites so much as two expressions of the same movement. I once heard a Tibetan teacher ask a room full of students, “How many of you have accepted the reality of death?” It being a Buddhist gathering a few hands went up.
Then he asked, “How many of you understand that you are dying right now?”
That question remains with me.
The death of winter is already the birth of spring. The end is already the beginning. And just as surely as every beginning comes from death, every life leads to this same destination.
In birth we leave behind of the dark and protected enclosure that first held us. In our life, living to our fullest is leaving the soft enclosure of our cocoon and learning not to squint so much at the sun. But looking ahead, we always miss what’s behind. It pulls us. What we’ve experienced feels so much more real than what we’ve yet to experience. Beginning is always a barter with something we lose.
I think of my niece on her wedding day, radiant in the doorway beside her father, suspended in that extraordinary moment before stepping forward. The future seemed so luminous that I had to go and offer my blessing.
As I drew closer, she was l cursing in that abrupt jersey way that the damned dress was cutting into her ribs.
There it was all at once: the transcendent and the corporeal, the sacred and the profane, the perfect image and the very human discomfort beneath it.
Every human birth is beautiful and painful and horrible. Because awakening is not abstract. It happens precisely here, in the tender recognition that life is moving, changing, dissolving, and renewing in every moment.
Many years ago, I found myself in a mountain community of practitioners who had been deeply shaken by the death of their teacher. There was grief everywhere, yet also an extraordinary honesty and warmth.
In that open mountain space, my own heart began to soften. Something in me that had been encased began to thaw. What I discovered was that there are two kinds of containers. One is the bubble of self-protection, which suffocates possibility. The other is the cradle of love and kindness, which allows something truer to be born.
The first imprisons. The second incubates.
Perhaps this is the real invitation of spring: not merely to admire rebirth in nature, but to allow it in ourselves. To understand that every awakening asks for a small death.
Every fresh morning is also the ending of the night. So whether the weather is good or gloomy, if we’re sad or glad, any movement of mind is precious and everything we encounter is an invitation to wake up.
Good morning.