Call it an early morning reverie.

It’s my time when the world is not fully awakened, and there’s a special quietness that lends itself to a bit of introspection. You know, an awareness of the gift of life itself, not the least of which is the majesty of nature in its new beginning of each new day.

I am reminded of that wonderful hymn, “Morning Has Broken.” The third verse begins “Mine is the sunlight! Mine is the morning, born of the one light Eden saw play! Praise with elation, praise every morning, God’s recreation of the new day!” I’ll take a morning with or without sunlight. It’s all good.

But oh, my. How I love that hymn.

Then too, it seems my thoughts, as they do so often, turn to memories of those who have gone before. Who have, as the British soldiers would say in the “Great War:” “Gone West.”

It would probably be that most of you, kind readers, have such thoughts as well. When one has been blessed to have had a long life — as we measure and mark time — then there are so many, who were so dear to us, who have “Gone West.”

My Aunt Margaret, who lived in Tarboro, and died at age 87, often lamented that “all my friends are gone.” That comes to those who have the gift of longevity.

I know that I look through my life’s “rearview mirror” too much. It’s hard not to.

Yet I also know that I hope for, pray for, am bold to believe, that someday, in some other dimension, I will be joined together again with beloved family and friends who were a part of my life; and that I will also “meet” those members of my family whom I never knew. May this be so for all of us.

Do I know, can I prove, that this is so? Of course not. But no one can disprove it either.

So, until that day, I shall treasure, savor the joy that comes when “Morning has broken.”

APROPOS — “ … the still beauty of dawn is nature’s finest balm.”

— Edwin Way Teale