I love quiet mornings. The sun has risen long ago in these early hours, but the light is soft and slanted. The air is cool and even the grass has a new-born freshness to it after sleeping through the night.

In the morning, I make coffee, take vegetable scraps out to the chicken yard, and plan my day. Sometimes, Bjorn the puppy (who is now really a dog) and I walk down the road in the early morning light while the coffee is steeping and our woodland slowly wakes up.

In this quiet there are no notification alerts. There are no likes or dislikes. There aren’t even the well-meaning misunderstandings of far away friends. Instead, my quiet mornings are rich with anticipation and untapped potential.

My sweet, quiet mornings are deceptively fragile. They feel like moments that can shatter in an instant – a barking dog or a dropped cup can cut the silence and make for a few hectic moments…but the quiet isn’t so easily broken. It’s an internal peace – a decision drawn out and given life. Peace, like “rebellion begins in the heart” as Camus wrote. The rebel “is fighting for the integrity of one part of his being. He does not try to conquer… He confronts an order of things.. with insistence on a .. right not to be oppressed beyond the limit he can tolerate.”

That’s it. Simple, small, and daily. A quiet desire to step out of the stream of constantly roiling emotions that is public discourse.

These quiet moments -intentionally stepping into the space where Christ and His vibrant world are the only influences – aren’t really fragile at all. Instead, they form the bedrock from which healthy rebellion can flow. “I think” as George Orwell writes, “that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies, and .. toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.” So, in the quiet mornings, I walk down my dirt road – sipping coffee and greeting the trees by name. I smile at the toad whole peeps out of his little house at me as I pass by and wave at my laughing crows as they play in the tree tops. In a world that seeks to funnel each person’s surplus energy into “hatred and leader worship” it is an act of defiance – a quiet, peaceful, life-giving rebellion.

I would love to read about your tiny acts of defiance – all the joy-filled ways you find to make the world closest to you a place of hopeful, rebellious calm.