Monday, May 10, 2010

Of Sheep And Fluffy Clouds

I try to remember a time when sleep came easily and I can’t rightly recall, though I’m sure such a thing must have existed. And I don’t mean the insta-sleep that followed taking Zopiclone or some other tranquilizer. I mean lying down in bed and falling asleep, having pleasant dreams that don’t wake you up at two in the morning, being refreshed upon awakening. You know, the stuff of legend.

I know, I know, it’s not even that late, so why am I talking about insomnia while trying to sleep when I could be doing something more productive? Why write a somnolence-inducing blog post at this early hour, when the night is still young and wanting to get its groove on?

More importantly, why am I writing it on my out-of-date Mac laptop instead of the computer I usually use?

Well, that part’s easy: I feel bad for it sitting here in its case all lonely and ignored. I bought it long ago so I could do my job as an academic aid to my blind student more easily. I’ve written many fine and not-so-fine essays on this thing. At the end of the day, I’m simply nostalgic. Also, it kind of amuses me that some of the more popular letters are a bit worn off.

Sleep, or the lack thereof, reflects a part of my larger reality, the part where I feel exhausted for only vaguely discernible reasons. It’s not that my life isn’t full of little meaningful nice things, because it is. My tree bloomed three weeks early, and I took many many pictures of it, getting to enjoy the smell of it, and its buzzing sound (the bees like it too, you know), and the birds nuzzling up to the blossoms at dusk. I’ve been feeling sick recently from the meds stuff, and enjoyed waaaaaaay too much chicken noodle soup today. It was fantastic and warm and salty. I love salt. Salt is necessary for life.

This longing...this longing for a resting place that isn’t merely somewhere to be still but to find stillness, this is like a picture of something bigger in my life that I don’t comprehend. I want not the darkness and nothingness but the something behind it, the thing that can’t be seen by directly looking. Glimpsed in sideways glances, at the edge of vision, when seeking something else. The desire to be held in God’s embrace to sleep and then to wake.

What God has showed is what God has showed and the rest remains hidden. Though we may want and believe we need to see into the mist and shadows, there remains an outer darkness beyond which it is not given to us to know. We can count sheep for hours and not find rest in much the same way as we can ask to behold and not see. Many things can be desired and not grasped, many things asked for and not received. You get an answer if you knock on the right door, and the rest is the fluffy clouds of longing. The soul speaks a language the heart does not always understand. I long to sleep but yet I wake, on the edge of waiting for that which I do not yet know.

The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want; He maketh me down to lie. The lying down is not sleeping, but waiting for life to begin; it is before being led to green pastures. Being sleepy is okay because it takes from me nothing I need (except possibly coherence, which isn’t that necessary anyway). I have God, and so want for nothing. Our Lord, awake in the garden, tormented by our hurt, what else is there? What is it to feel anything, compared to this? Is there any sorrow like his sorrow, any life but his?

No one dies of exhaustion.

These ridiculous posts though, they might kill you, or possibly make you mad. Best watch out for that.

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