The quiet stillness of the morning is my favorite time of day.

As creation wakes and my soul is renewed, I am often reminded of this stanza from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is one of many that I memorized in my twenties, and it remains with me like an old friend:

God’s Grandeur

And for all this, nature is never spent;
   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.