Not My Wake

🌿 Not My Wake

When Nature Awakens, So Do We
By Haroon
The morning began with laughter.

Not the human kind. The Kookaburra’s cackle pierced the veil of sleep like a flash of mischief rolling down the eucalyptus grove outside my window. I blinked. One bird, then two—then an entire chorus of feathered jesters, turning the dawn into a raucous performance.

It was as if nature refused to let me sleep through this day. Or maybe it was trying to make a point.

This wasn't my first morning in the cabin. I’d booked the escape after a string of sleepless city nights, hoping the silence of the woods would drown out the noise in my head. Instead, I got birds with a sense of humor and dreams that didn’t feel like mine.

Every morning, the same recurring dream: panic, urgency, an asteroid tearing across the sky, on course for Earth. Faces around me morphing with fear, voices drowning in static. Not exactly the restful reset I’d hoped for. But something about the vividness stuck. Not terrifying, but symbolic—like my subconscious had been trying to deliver a message in Morse code made of meteorites.

I wrapped myself in a blanket and stepped onto the deck, the early sunlight filtering through tall trees like stained glass. My fingers curled around a chipped coffee mug that had seen more sunrises than most people. The air was fresh enough to taste.

This wasn’t my usual wake-up call. Not alarms or email pings or subway rumblings. It was something quieter. Wiser.

I thought about the dream again. The asteroid. The panic. But why the calm in my chest when I woke? Why did the terror feel like someone else’s story?

Maybe that was the point.

Maybe the dream was the version of me I’d been carrying for too long. The one too afraid to let go. To admit that not every crisis belonged to me. That I didn't have to answer every emergency, fix every broken thing, or shoulder every ending.

This moment—this morning—was not my wake. It wasn’t a funeral for who I used to be. It was the morning I finally chose to live as someone new.

The Kookaburras kept laughing, but it didn’t annoy me this time. It sounded like nature’s applause. Or nature teasing me for taking so long to get the joke.

I wandered the trail behind the cabin, bare feet brushing against dew-speckled grass. The world was wide and wild, untamed and uninterested in my timelines. I passed a fallen branch shaped like a question mark. Fitting. I’d spent months living in questions I was too scared to ask out loud:

What happens if I don’t meet expectations?
Who am I outside the identity others built for me?
What’s left when you stop clinging to the story that’s unraveling?

As the trail opened up to a clearing, I stopped. Eucalyptus trees formed a circle. In the center, a patch of earth untouched by footprints. It felt sacred.

I sat.

The ground was warm from sunlight. The breeze smelled like freedom.

I didn’t think about the dream then. I didn’t analyze it or interpret symbolism or journal my conclusions. I just breathed.

And in that breath, something shifted.

A quiet knowing. That sometimes the deepest wake-up moments come when we realize the disasters we dread aren’t ours to carry. That healing doesn't arrive with fireworks, but with birdcalls and light falling softly through trees.

I didn't cry. Not out of numbness, but because peace had no tears left to give. I simply watched the sunlight draw patterns in the dust and let myself feel new.

Back at the cabin, I wrote one sentence in my notebook:

“This wasn’t my wake—and that’s why I woke up.”Start writing...