The middle of the night is dangerous.

Darkness and quiet can look like a good time to commit a private crime.

The middle of the night is worrisome.

Darkness and quiet can feel like the right time to worry about something not thought about so much in the busy day.

The middle of the night is fertile.

Darkness and time can look like a good time to concentrate on making that precious person feel good, feel as good as they would feel more often if the daylit world weren't so tough.

The middle of the night is fertile.

Darkness and quiet and time can mean inviting in hopes and focussing on them as intensely as I focus on night worries, when I'm worrying,

Things that seem so impossibly good that they aren't even thought of in the daytime are waiting quietly at night.

They know they are possible. They are waiting for someone to notice them. They are waiting for someone to think around them.

If it were possible, how would it be possible?

If it were possible and came to exist, how would we feel then? How would we live our mornings, noons and nights.

And what impossible ideas would then begin to loom on the new horizon.

Being out in the part of night running up to dawn in a place where there is enough nature for nature to speak its own way, there are many stages of dawn before the light changes in any obvious way.

There is a lightening of spirit before the lightening of the sky.

And the air changes. There is a newly focussed coolness just before the sun's gleam starts to show.

This is the air as it would be if we didn't do so many things to it day by day.

The without us air which is big, more connected to the big universe than day air.

Breathing this air we can easily think and hope things that are hard to believe when we're breathing the old aquarium water of daytime air.

"Let's go out in the dark of the night and kill somebody."

"Let's go out in the dark of the night and feel a distinctly different kind of hope."

It seems like the definite crimes would overwhelm the vague hopes. But no. We're still here.

Sometimes foreplay is all about that moment and that's enough. Sometimes foreplay includes being about the ultimate kid--the child who grows out of the act of love.

The foreplay choices have a lot to do with who the child is because this moment or that moment for coming means this sperm or that sperm swims into a very transformative future.

To have this many people, we need more new dreams. The vague hopes of the early morning air are vague because they haven't happened yet. Things like them haven't happened yet.

The vague hopes are sometimes a fine and needed morale booster for the moment.

Other times the vague hopes are foreplay for the birth of a new way of living in the world.

Sometimes night time is dangerous for ways of being that need to be endangered.

"Let's make something really really happen. Let's be violent."

Awful lot of propaganda for that point of view. The boomiest is the realest.

And the counter that we have. . . .

Patience with the vague hopes of early morning. Patience to stay with them when we aren't experienced enough to see how they will be real. Patience enough to stay with them and make them real one little bit at a time.

Each bit of dream made real is real and important. It's as real as all the people who don't get shot in the middle of the night. And if you look around in bright daylight you will not that such people are real and numerous. (And secretly numinous--that's what we work on making realer in the department of hope.)