Morning Has Broken | How one song helped me cope with loss and embrace new life | by Susan H. Evans | Inspiring Story #159

I moved to Baltimore eight months ago from a mountain town in Tennessee. My daughter was having a baby, and I wanted to help. Residual grief from my mother’s death haunted me, though, and I felt an alarming disorientation after the move. 

In May, my daughter returned to work, and I began caring for my granddaughter, driving 15 minutes to my daughter's house each morning. Sadness, loneliness, and fear gripped me as I gripped the steering wheel of my car, navigating traffic, unfamiliar roads, and construction detours. I felt lost, inside and out.

About two months ago, as I was searching on YouTube for something to listen to on the nerve-wracking drive, Cat Stephen's “Morning Has Broken” appeared. It had been a top hit in 1972.

Listening to the words and music, I felt as if I had entered a sacred place. Out of the gray light surrounding me, suddenly, sunlight poured through my car windows and flowed into my heart. My timorous mind calmed, my frayed nerves relaxed, my depression lifted, and an emotional and reverential chord struck deep within me. I felt lifted into a higher vibration, as if by magic.

I thought about this song and its relevance to my granddaughter. Viewed from her bright blue eyes, each of her mornings since her birth in February has been her “first morning{s},” as the song goes.  And every day, Evie -- like her namesake  -- rises in the light of Eden's reborn sun, as she awakens from her crib, sucks on her index finger, and stretches in her little blue sleeper sack. Every morning is a miracle and revelation, each of her days “spring{ing} fresh from the world,” with an ever-increasing awareness of earth’s “sweet” rains, heavenly sunlight, and “fresh dewfall on the first grass.”

Cat Stephens sings that each dawn is “God’s re-creation of the new day,” and I could add that Evie, too, and all babies, are “re-creations,” each unique and beautiful as the sunrise bursting through the clouds, and come to us like heavenly beams of radiant light piercing this dark, sad world.

You see, I, too, am being re-created and given new life, healing from an overwhelming sense of loss. Evie is like a little candle, and her light rekindles my own.

So now, as I drive these city streets lined with trees and row houses during this lovely Indian summer, I rise beyond the traffic congestion, the bad drivers, and the twisty roads, and I give thanks that every morning is a gift for me, and “mine (not just Evie’s) is the sunlight, mine is the morning,” and I, too, was “born from that one light.”