I am up.

I walked to work today because I'd left my bike on campus. I'm assuming it's still in the rack by the dorms by the parking garage where I left it locked at 7:00 on Friday morning, pre- all-day conference and post- don't-rain-don't-rain!! sprint up the hill.
The walking was GOOD. I can get into mornings. Second best to camping.
I'm thinking of this because I was camping this weekend, and I kept thinking MORNINGS! The morning, when you're camping, is the best part. You wake up early because campgrounds are awake early, and the Chinese family reunion across the way and near the water pump is full of early risers. I don't always let them slide by, morning noises, but when I'm in a tent, and the early sun is shining through the canvas, I forgive. To be burrowed in a sleeping bag, fending off the dew and chill, long past the part when the ground is hard and into the part when your muscles have learned how to relax into the dips and grooves, and to know that soon--it really doesn't matter when--you will pull yourself up and into sweats and out of the tent, and--eventually--you'll have a fire going, and smoke-flavored eggs for breakfast along with the wild raspberries picked from the bushes that surround the campsite... this, this is the best way to have a morning.
I hold on to complete feelings like these because I know I will probably soon drift back into the state which has become my default this summer--the way my whole mind feels the way the skin on your forearm does an hour after you brush against a stinging nettle plant. That not actively stinging but phantom stinging, worried feeling. It saps me.
But what I mean to say is that walking to work this morning didn't feel like an OPTION before I left my front door, but it is, and to feel that in my legs and to notice the way those miles cleared some of my dullness is almost as good as waking up at the beginning of a day in a tent in the woods.