Finding grace among ancient ruins at dawn — thanks to the yelping of a dog

Jim O'Brien

Early morning is a time of the day that can be yours and yours alone

Sunrise At Lough Derg. Photo: Deposit

November 01 2022 02:30 AM

The dog gets me up early in the morning. She hasn’t taken well to the winter clock, her half-six is our half-five. As soon as she wakes, she reckons the rest of the house should also rouse itself and, so, starts yelping in her cage. I ease myself out of the bed, trying not to disturb the current consort who sleeps the sleep of the just and the pure of heart. Using the torch on my mobile phone, I pull on whatever clothes are near at hand and appropriate for the weather. I fumble my way downstairs where I follow a routine designed to ensure the dog gets from her cage to the backdoor with the minimum of fuss.

She is a gangly, sinewy, lean-framed bullet of energy with no appreciation of her own strength. I unlock the back door and get myself suitably booted before I approach the cage with lead in hand. The opening of the cage door is followed by a frenetic few moments of crisis management. Trying to hold the dog while attaching the lead to the collar is like trying to hold an eel that has the strength of a small pony. Once the lead is secured, I’m hauled out the backdoor by the bounding hound anxious to attend to some urgent morning business.

Once she has completed her early morning ablutions and her paws are wiped down, it’s time for breakfast. She gets a fistful of dog-nuts, served in a bowl, which she tries to head-butt out of my hands. After she gulps it down, she settles, at least until nature calls again.

At this point I have the choice of re-joining my slumbering consort in the scratcher or putting on the kettle. I’m not a great one for going back to bed, when I’m up I stay up, even though I know at some stage in the day I’ll probably fall asleep at the desk where I have been known to nod off with a finger still on the keyboard. I often wake to find pages filled with thousands of reproductions of a single letter.

Most mornings, after facilitating my canine charge to perform her bodily functions, I opt to brew the first and best pot of coffee of the day and make my way to the desk.

Since the summer, my workstation has been relocated to the sunroom overlooking Inis Cealtra or Holy Island, one of the largest islands on Lough Derg. It is recorded in the Annals of Inishfallen as an important monastic establishment as far back as 654. Its monastic ruins include a round tower, six churches, graveyards, high crosses and a holy well. According to local historian Gerard Madden, monks from Holy Island have had a lasting impact on European Christianity in particular, St Donatus (790 – 876), the Bishop of Fiesole in Tuscany who was educated at Inis Cealtra. One of the graveyards is to host the final resting place of writer Edna O’Brien.

The island is a magnet for the sunlight and often, when all around is in shadow and shrouded in misty grey, Inis Cealtra can be bathed in sun as if picked out by a giant spotlight in the sky. I sometimes look across and think of the monastic rhythm of prayer and work that characterised daily life on the 45ac island from matins to the Great Silence.

In the morning, as the island emerges from the dark of night, the ancient round tower catches the early light and looks completely different than it does during the day. Dawn gives a different look to everything. The phrase, ‘the cold light of day’ is far from a meaningless idiom. There is something about the crisp and brittle newness of the early hours that is mind cleansing — it represents a time free of the clutter of yesterday and not yet smothered by the cares of today.

The half-light of morning sheds itself from a different angle and gives a very different perspective to that afforded by the glare of noon or the tiredness of the evening.

Early morning is free of the pressures of the day. It is free of ‘shoulds’, there is nothing else I ‘should’ be doing, there is nobody waiting for anything, this part of the day is a blank page and nobody else has a call on it.

It is a good time to let the mind and heart explore the limits of all possibilities, a time to be treasured, a time when you are free to be fully alive, when you can find space beyond the myriad of expectations and demands.

Thanks to an impatient pup I have discovered, in the early morning, a space where a different light shines on the world, a grace-filled place where one is free to explore the questions that don’t get asked once the first phone call shatters the Great Silence.