alarm clock

Waking up early
Helps me find myself again
Growing in wholeness
by David Aslesen

It’s called paresthesia – that tingling, pins and needles feeling you get when your leg starts to wake from being “asleep.” I am waking up and have paresthesia of the soul and heart.

I suppose it’s part of what happens in midlife. We’ve become who we are, we get restless, and wonder what’s next? The shock and grief of my divorce is behind me, and I am coming back to myself. But there is something more stirring in me, I think. And it is painful and awkward and wonderful all the same time.

It’s what gave birth to this blog – a need to stretch and risk and try something new. A desire to practice writing, and the audacious idea that maybe someone somewhere would want to read it.

Naming my blog involved sending friends text and Facebook messages with random words like dust, behold and wonder. Friends made helpful (and not so helpful suggestions): Dust in the Wind (I had an ear worm for a week), Scratchings in Dust (sounded like someone was buried alive) and (my personal favorite) Melissa Mouths Off. And then, the morning the blog went live, I woke up with the title Waking Up Earley.


I wake up early.

Morning is my favorite time of day. I prefer sunrise to sunset. I like to pretend I am the first person awake in the world. I linger over coffee, reading the news or a book or just staring out the window. I take my dog for a walk. I now try to do some writing.


I wake up an Earley

“Wherever you go, there you are,” a friend of mine from college would often quote, which is both blessing and curse. We cannot escape ourselves. When I wake up, there I am.


Earley is Waking Up

I am waking up to a holy unsettledness. I long for new practices and a new language with which to encounter the holy. I am homesick for mountains and sunshine. I desire relationship and deep connection; I want to be knocked on my ass in love. And this writing thing feels like a call. It’s scary to say that out loud.

I teeter on the edge of some new thing.