Dark at 6:00 AM

Not that I want to complain or anything, but if you live in Brooklyn, NY and wake-up at 6:00 AM, you’re waking up in the dark.  Okay, true, most northern cities around the planet experience this as a regular feature of the winter months, but it doesn’t make it any more palatable.

So why am I up?  Well work for one, but more so to find the time for sit-ups and crunches, shadowing boxing, sun salutations, and in general gaining some moments before the rush of the day.  That it’s all in the dark gives this time a bit of mystery.  As if I were an acolyte of Nyx, the Greek Goddess of Night, reveling in the time before Helios makes his way across the sky in his golden chariot.

Waking up in the dark also seems to push one’s sense of purpose; as if in wrenching oneself from what otherwise feels so natural, one has made a bold statement of the importance of the time before morning.  Sure, it is morning by the clock, but the body remains in revolt, at least mine does.  And even as I make my moves around the living room, I keep looking out the window in the hopes of connecting myself with the first rays of morning light — recognizing that I will only find myself tune with the a natural order of things at that moment when I spy Homer’s “rosy fingered dawn.”