Tag: creativity

The Gift of Sleep

Sleep

A day with the Earth.  No other voice. 

And now, in the last hour, her presence grows stronger.  Instead of fading into darkness, the Earth makes herself felt deep within me.  In what meditation calls ‘the still centre’, the hollow just below the navel, I feel filled and fulfilled.

Earth’s stillness becomes my stillness.  Her silence, my calm thought. 

Natural as a mother’s young who nudge toward the safe place she creates, sleep will follow.

 

The above words write themselves, after I spend a day alone and never switch on the news in any sound form.

In the current pandemic, many of us have trouble finding sleep.   Fear escalates and speeds away rest, bringing nightmares instead.  It seems as though we can’t help it.   Yet, after working in communications for many years, what I’ve found is that we can choose not to hear many of the voices who cause fear.

‘News’ is not the equivalent of truth, but something manufactured, designed to keep us as listeners, helpless in the face of what is presented as insurmountable.   Radio and TV announcers are trained to put the kind of urgency and emphasis into their delivery which heightens our fear and dependence on them.

When I quit the communications business after fifteen years, the first thing I did was to cut myself off from TV and radio.  What we hear has a direct line to the brain, one that I don’t want to offer to sources I have learned not to trust.  The Internet has now shown that the advent of fake news even taints the word as text, with many news and social media feeds being heavily biased.  More and more, silence becomes the cleanest option for sleep hygiene.   If we need updates, local health announcements on email are more specific to our individual health and lack artificial drama.  Even these, I allow to access my thoughts in a sparing and controlled way.  For example, I avoid news reports at times when my sub-conscience is most vulnerable, such as when I first wake up, or in the hours leading to bedtime.

I’m not suggesting that we all bury our heads in the sand.   But in our news-saturated time, most of us do the opposite: we let ourselves become defenseless in the presence of those who seek to profit by launching more and more fears into our psyche.

If there is only one message I can give to those who share this pandemic situation with me, it is: let’s be more selective about what allow into our minds.  No one should rob us of the rest that renews.

We sit patiently and allow muddy thoughts to clear.                                                                        Life then lives itself in us.                                                                                                                                                              –quote adapted by William Martin from the Tao te Ching                                                                                                                                                                                   

After Christmas:  Let Boxing Day be different

 

My mind is not noisy with desires…

And my heart has satisfied its longing.                                Psalm 131

 

As I write this, deep snow has settled on the evening of December 25th.  The Christmas shopping ritual has just ended.  On my car radio, among the tinny carols, I hear Van Morrison repeat a phrase from Poetic Champions Compose: non-attachment, non-attachment.

For those of us like me, who overspent again this year, and felt retail’s hollow afterthought where our spirit should have been, the song rings like an anthem for 2017.  Non-attachment is currently best known as a Zen way of thinking about the world without clinging to it, nor to our position in it.  Yet the above Psalm, quoted by Muslim, Jewish and Christian holy men, reveals that the idea of non-attachment continues in many other spiritual traditions.

As I quietly step in, brush off the snow and hang up my coat, I find solace in the silence.  Perhaps it’s not too late to find a new path for the holidays.  I live five minutes from a supermall, and the thought of returning there for Boxing Day shopping tomorrow sickens me.  So does the thought of plowing through all the excess food and gifted goodies in my kitchen.

Boxing Day is so named because, for hundreds of years, those who had plenty would distribute their extra food and clothes to the poor.  The idea of using this day for the prosperous to accumulate yet more, is relatively recent, a nightmare invented by retailers.

As I turn off the tree lights for the night, a thought comes to me.  My local YMCA is collecting food for local shelters and the town food bank. I remember that late on Christmas Eve, I noticed that, though we are one of the wealthiest communities in the country, the box was only half-full. Tomorrow afternoon, Dec. 26, is the time scheduled for the box to be sent out.  I can still make a difference!

I shrug off the fatigue I’ve been feeling from a day of too much food, too many gifts, and swing into action.  I find a large box of my own, and fill it with tinned soups, stews and all my extra boxed cookies and chocolate.  A clear recycling bag enables me to add the clothing I’ve received but don’t need.

I have a new plan for tomorrow now.  I’m going to bypass the mall, drop off my donation, and offer to help distribute to the needy.  As William Blake, the poetic conscience of the early Industrial Age, wrote:

“ You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”

 

The light that wells up in me – Strategies for coping with S.A.D. this winter

After a day trapped in the city, its noise and shadow still closing in, I cut through rough country, to where still water hides.  On the shore’s soft edge, I cross my legs and lean back into the hammock of my raised arms.  So keenly the day distills into this small lake, I can barely contain the light that wells up inside me.

Did you know that our bodies read artificial light as darkness?  I learned this as a teacher, watching students drowse beneath the brightest of fluorescents on the ceiling.  Natural light is much more subtle, more susceptible to the kind of complex ‘reading’ a human body performs.  As soon as I flicked the switches off, and lifted the blinds, the young people opened toward me, like flower-faces at dawn.

Early man did not just use light as a means to prolong work.  He interpreted it to understand weather, and the changing seasons.  His senses took from it complex clues, such as when plants would be ready to eat, and which sides of a ravine, chosen for shelter, would allow his children to grow and prosper.  Far in the reaches of his brain, there turned rhythms.  Light-sensitive, these led his body around the circle of a day toward the deep, ingrained marker where he would fall asleep.

The loss of Circadian rhythms is perhaps the single deepest felt loss our recent generations have sustained.  Electricity has forced countless shift workers into poor health and prolonged mental confusion, as they struggle to overcome what the body knows.  Tube lights notwithstanding, our inner self feels acute awareness of the dark, and the need to sleep.  Beyond factories, many office workers are so strapped for time during the day, that we try to cheat our bodies with night-time chores, such as shopping.  This turn forces retail workers into night work limbo.  In Northern countries, higher proportions of us spend whole work-weeks without natural light than ever before.

Small wonder that many of us begin to feel ‘low’.  When you have no sight of the sky, where will you find room to soar?  I challenged myself with this question when, in my early thirties, I lost motivation as soon as daylight savings time ended.  I had never heard of S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder), but my family doctor had no doubt that it was the cause of my listlessness and depression in late fall.

Strategies for coping with S.A.D.

Just the way you would move a houseplant to catch the sun, I began to seek ways into the light. Below I’ll share with you what worked for me.

1)I stopped taking the subway to work, walking blocks in pearly light to watch the morning rise.

2)I took in fresh air and outdoor light every lunchtime, nourishing all my senses, not just my tongue.

3)If winter days were short, I’d take an outdoor stroll or run near my work location, rather than sliding into the gym when I got home.

4)Most of all, I made a quest of each small park, ravine and body of water concealed within my urban environment. (Water reflects and magnifies light, so it can cause your eyes and spirit to lift on even the dullest day.)

5) Find a way to hold and cherish your moments of light, by drawing, word sketching, or even composing a song. (This piece was written by a hidden urban lake, in a small window of time.)  Let’s return now to where that window opens…

Just before sunset, the lake lays down a path into the Milky Way, leads my eye down through the depths of clouds, toward planets submerged beyond.

At this moment, I glimpse why people immerse(baptise) to become holy –

Water is the closest sky.