Ramadan, revisited

At 7am, campus is deserted. Birds anticipating dawn chitter excitedly in the bushes, the night's rain glistens in puddles under the lamplight, and the stone courtyards are stately and serene, belying the frenetic energy of miniskirts and skateboards that rule the daylight hours. At 7am it feels like the university is all mine,  boundless and promising, ripe with possibility, unfettered by the jostling expectations of so many others. I open my laptop and...

...reality hits. I am no more productive at 7am than I am at any other time of day. The thesis elves have not come in during the night and magically transformed my writing into something brilliant (or at least complete). The same pesky pile of revisions that was there yesterday is still waiting for me, supervisor comments so thick upon the page that the original text is barely visible. My to-do list has not disappeared despite the multitude of items that have been crossed off it, but instead has grown longer with new items added on top of the old. The collection of yellow post-its bearing bibliographic references for sources I need to look up have become so plentiful that it appears my new wall-mounted earthquake-proof bookshelf is wearing its own ruffled gown. Ah, morning!

Lest you think that I am complaining, let me take this opportunity to say that I love my life! The university is paying me to do my own research, in my own time, in a town that is so beautiful that I find myself repeating in awe 'I LIVE here!' several times a day. Now, in the middle of winter, it is lush and green. The harbour almost always looks like a watercolour painting. And thanks to the combined emissions of the Cadbury chocolate and Gregg's coffee factories, the air smells like baking about every other day. Lazy thesis-elves aside, life is good here.

Which is all just a very long lead-in to say that it is Ramadan again, day 14. Partly to say thank you for all the goodness in my life, partly to remind myself that many people aren't so lucky as I am, partly in support of a very dear friend, and partly for a lot of other reasons that I won't go into right now, I am observing the Ramadan fast for a second time. Amazing that it's half over already. Having been through it once before, this time has been much easier to manage. Knowing what to expect takes you a long way, I'm discovering, as does having someone else around to share the experience with. Unlike last year, when I skulked around the house in secret for the first two weeks so as not to disturb my observant housemate(s), this year we planned from the beginning to meet together in the morning. The one other person in the house following through this time still thinks I am about the most stubborn person he's ever met on earth, but seems happy enough to have someone in the house to start the day with regardless. As much as Ramadan will always be an individual experience, it is also a communal one, and isolating if you are alone.

What I've noticed most this Ramadan is not the hunger or the thanksgiving or the physical manifestations of not eating or drinking for many hours a day that I was so caught up in last time, although all those are definitely present. It's the stars. Waking well before dawn and eating after sunset leaves the dark hours of day my most energetic.  At 5:30am, going down to the kitchen for pre-dawn breakfast, the stars are incredible. The back hall of the gothic mansion that I live in, all windows, glows with the reflected light of a thousand stars hanging above the hills that descend to the harbour just out of sight. It is impossible to see without awe. And walking home in the evening, the grand old turrets of the house seem to belong to another age with the dancing swirl of clearly-visible galaxies overhead. It doesn't seem possible that so many stars should be so easy to see through the accumulated lights of the city, but they are. As the French saying goes, 'Our corner of the earth is small, but it carries a big sky!'

This morning when I said my pre-fast prayers, I imagined all those stars as points of light forming an enormous golden web over the Earth and reaching down to touch all of the golden points of light that are the

people all over the world that I love. And then I saw those points of light reaching out to join with all of the people that they love, and so on and so on, until every person in the world was alight with love and

everything around us was illuminated. If only it was always so simple to see the connections between us all! How much harder would it be to hate if we could all see how loved we are at every moment, how loved

everyone must be!  Happy Ramadan!