My morning ritual is a quiet, individual one. I like to take a run as soon as I wake up -- in frigid, two-pairs-of-leggings winter weather or humid, oppressive, sweaty summer heat. When I say "like", I mean of course that I fight it for the first ten minutes (and sometimes it only lasts ten minutes, let's be honest), but I give myself over to the knowledge that my future self will be happier, calmer, and a nicer person if I run.
Then there is coffee. Or tea, if I'm home, with heavy cream and honey. If you've never had raw milk cream, you should. After milking, you let the milk sit and the cream will float to the top in a thick, pale yellow layer. You take it off with a hefty deep spoon. We keep ours in Mason jars with white tops. Raw Jersey cream is so thick it almost looks like yogurt, and it drips veeeeery slowly off your spoon. You need only a teaspoonful to make tea taste very good, but I usually give myself three or four because it's too good to eat in any sort of half-hearted manner.
Breakfast will be, or not be, depending on where I am and who I'm with. Soft scrambled eggs laced with basil and sharp cheddar cheese, or barely-sweet granola, crunchy with millet and maple syrup and dried mulberries.
If every breakfast was like this one from the Wind and the Willows, I'd be happy, wouldn't you?
She carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender, of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries. [Kenneth Grahame]
I wish I never turned on my phone until after all of this. I'd like to leaf through a newspaper in a patch of sunlight, or sit at an expansive wooden table and read a book. I'll keep practicing the art of morning quiet until I get there -- if it doesn't happen, each morning is a new chance to try and stay in the moment and singularly focused before the whole day rushes in.