3. First things first: Coffee, Cats, and a Soft Landing
"Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don’t serve them tea." ~ Suzuki Roshi, Zen monk and teacher, on how to meditate
Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.
~ Suzuki Roshi, Zen monk and teacher, on how to meditate
This morning, like most, I padded into the kitchen, half in shadow, half in light, and reached instinctively for the coffee. The coffee comes first. Always does. Rich, dark, alive. As it brewed, I cleared last night’s quiet messes. A few plates. A drift of crumbs. The small domestic rituals that tether me softly to this morning, here and now.
The countertop now clean, a quiet offering to the day ahead.
The rule for this time of the day is simple: I can think, but not chase or leap. Don’t plan, don’t fix, don’t stitch and contort myself into anything yet. Let the day stay soft and unopened. No plotting or planning. No replaying old wounds. No letting the mind get loud and jangly. There’s time for all that - just not now.
The garden is already humming by the time I make my way to it. I run my fingers over the leaves - stroking to feel the papery leaves of the pothos, the waxy leaves of the ZZ, the dusty ones of the monstera as old as me. Flicking away dry specks, checking for freshly-minted baby earthworms that look like misshapen commas, pressing the soil just enough to feel the dampness within it. Alive but not quite awake. The world hasn’t fully arrived yet, and neither had I.
This is my morning ritual, a kind of meditation rooted in movement.
Kiki and Sherpa circle close. On days like today, after Garfield the Boycat has paid a visit, they need a little coaxing to come over into the garden. They amble over, brushing against my ankles, they know this is our sacred hour. I reach down to run my hands along their backs, feel their soft insistence, their quiet demand for touch till a full cat passes through my palm and I’m left holding a tail. Just breath, sunlight, chlorophyll, and caffeine. And a furry cat tail at my fingertips.
They remind me: attention is presence and presence is a kind of prayer too.
Most mornings, my mind is quiet, tuned to the immediate. I’ll notice how the light has changed - arriving sooner in the robin-blue kitchen, sharper on the yellow chair, slicing through the lone window like it’s got somewhere to be.
Sometimes I smell the garbage truck before I hear it rumbling down the lane, all clang and metal drama, or catch fragments of someone’s breathless phone call—urgent, forgettable. There might still be a trace of the smoky memory of upma cooked slow in ghee in a neighbour’s kitchen. I’ll catch the dust, too—how it gathers along the edges of the room, quietly asserting its presence, like time leaving fingerprints.
Some mornings I write. Some, I read. Others, I just watch what rises in me like steam from the cup - fleeting thoughts, quiet joys, passing worries. I don’t entertain them. I don’t shut the door, either. They can pass through. No need to offer them coffee.
Can I spend an extra breath noticing how the light now comes in earlier, slanting across the garden just so. How the air holds the breath of last night’s rain. The hum of the city beginning to stir. All of it, so ordinary and holy.
Minutes pass and I’m more here. A little more in my skin. More ready to meet whatever wild, wondrous thing is waiting to unfold.
This time is for arrival, not a performance. A practice. A soft landing into the day. For remembering I have a body, a breath, a life.
A reminder that before I go out to do, I’m allowed to be.