The breeze brushes my cheeks as I open the back door and step out onto the back porch. My eyes skip up the mountain, past the dogwood to the sky. The blue looks like it’s been hit with a spotlight, and the clouds are the white of Santa’s beard. Morning here at God’s Whisper always comes full of promises the size of boulders and the weight of cotton. 
This morning I woke to see the sun golden the air behind the mountains across the way, the light crisp as peaches.
Yet, I have to throw my shoulders back and down to keep myself from charging past this moment to the next and the next. I have to plant my feet and breath that peach lightness into my soles. Or else I lean too forward into soon and miss now.
This leaning is easy for me. I plan. I list. I look ahead, almost never back, although I know those who crane their necks to see over their shoulders in the same way that I inch mine ahead to get a better look. Yet, all this reaching does is give me a stiff neck.
Even now, before 7am on a Monday in July, the time and day when I should most be able to see this is a beginning, a moment to settle in and let things be, I push ahead, having to force myself to stay here with this blank screen and the dawn creeping over my shoulder to steam the day.
This now, this quiet place feels between to me, between two great things, like the mountains that frame the farm. The book that is done and the one that is just beginning. I don’t do well with betweens.
Yet, I am learning that gifts only come now – the Avian Tabernacle Choir singing, the air still cool in the first light, moments to sit and breathe in all that I have and cannot grasp. The memory and the promise in each breath.
We all want processes – steps to take to the next thing, lists, rules, guidelines. But the best I have is this today. This moment is mine to take in, to see, to shape. I will let it soak into my skin like sunshine, and then I will write it back out like breath.
For you, is it the leaning forward or the looking back that gets in the way of your writing now? Or have you managed to find a way to live in the now?