It’s the peaceful silence that draws me out of my slumber. The soft glow of the candlelight that pulls me out of the warm comfort of my blankets and into the chill of the early morning embrace. The birdsong outside my window as my thoughts dance across the pages of my journal. The sand in my hourglass a visual testament of how quickly the seconds flow into the minutes.

Before long, the sun creeps up on the horizon, casting away the familiar shadows back into the corners to reunite with the long-legged spiders. The spell is broken. It’s another new day.

Once in a while, the magic of these solitary moments lingers longer with Raven on my lap, as awake as a little puppy who just had a nap. Her tiny body molds into mine, taking comfort in the beating of my heart and the soft fluffiness of my oodie.

“Mama, I wanna pick a card,” she’d say, reaching for my Alice the Wonderland oracle deck. Her favorite because it has pictures of a cat in it.

“I like it ‘coz it’s so cute,” she’d croon. Her mouth pouting into an O at the word ‘cute.’

“What is this?” she would ask of each and every card she’d draw. She wants me to read the words underneath and I would. This is how I boost her literacy and promote her sense of intuition at the same time.

“What does it mean?” she would probe further. And still I try my best to answer her as honestly as I possibly can at a level that I can only hope she’d understand.

One time she picked a card: Mortality. That was her first time to encounter the word. A difficult subject to discuss with a 5-year old but I gave it to her anyway.

“Mortality means people die,” I explained, slowly breathing in for inspiration from the universe on how to answer such an innocent soul.

“People die when they’re old,” she offered.

“Well, some people die young, too,” I said regrettably. Because ain’t that the truth?

*Raven at 5 years old