Archives for category: Sleepless Nights

I woke with a terrible headache. I woke much earlier than I needed to be awake. I used the opportunity to open the windows and patio door to the pre-dawn breezes and fresh air, and cooling the apartment before the heat of the day. Doing so had no effect on the headache. I didn’t really expect it would. The headache made me ill with vertigo. I made it to the bathroom in time for nausea to avoid becoming a mess that requires cleaning up. A migraine? No, I think it over and realize it’s just one of the occasional outcomes of taking Rx pain medication (for me), pretty commonly; I was in enough pain last night to take pain medication.

I made coffee, did my morning yoga and physical therapy stuff. The headache continues. I take some Tylenol for the headache. I have a mammogram today. I barely care; this headache is kicking my ass – and winning. Half-way through my coffee, the nausea wins, too. 😦 Sometimes being a human primate is fairly disgusting.

I write a bunch, delete all of it, deciding I don’t prefer to write about war, violence, or hate today. My heart aches for the victims of violence, the living and the dead. What action am I taking? I am living my life peacefully, refusing to take up arms, and treating my fellow human beings as human beings; we’re all in this together, each of us quite human. Each having our own experience. Each likely thinking we’re the good guy, regardless what the other guy thinks of our actions.

Love matters most.

Love matters most.

My evening with my traveling partner was delightfully well-spent. Even this cursed headache doesn’t dim my smile when I think about our evening together. It wasn’t fancy, but love isn’t about fancy things, or planned events, or expensive trinkets. Love depends on a quality connection, not a fat bank account. 🙂

Be love. It's a choice. Love is a verb.

Be love. It’s a choice. Love is a verb.

This headache continues to mess with my enjoyment of the morning, although it has begun to fade after a third round of nausea becomes a third opportunity to become really skilled at vomiting. (So gross.) Wow. Headaches, puking, violence, love… this blog post has it all! I chuckle to myself, aware that this morning’s writing hardly amounts to ‘content’ at all. I feel very human, in the most limiting sense.  There’s no disappointment in that awareness, in spite of the headache, the violence in the world, or a few moments of nausea on a Friday morning; being human is so much more than those details. I love. I am loved. Each morning I face a new opportunity to choose well for myself, and to be present, to love – and to love more. Good stuff.

"Emotion and Reason" 18" x 24" acrylic w/ceramic and glow details

“Emotion and Reason” 18″ x 24″ acrylic w/ceramic and glow details

There’s so much fear and violence in the world. Fear. Violence. Fear and violence. Fear of violence. Bleak. It’s both bleak and tragic, on top of being so entirely unnecessary. Today I’ll do my small part to change the world by engaging strangers in genial conversation: brown strangers, dark strangers, fair strangers, ginger strangers, foreign strangers, male strangers, child strangers, woman strangers, strangers of no obvious gender or ethnicity, strangers of poetic beauty, strangers who appear disengaged and uninvolved with the world around them, strangers who want conversation – we are all human beings, and in that sense, we are not strangers to each other at all. There’s no reason to be afraid.

Today is a good day to choose peace.

 

I slept late this morning. I had awakened during the night for no obvious reason, and woke breathless, heart pounding, in the grip of anxiety. I forgot to take it at all personally, or to read anything whatever into it, these were simply sensations I woke with. I got up. Opened some windows to let cool night breezes blow through the apartment. I took a seat on my meditation cushion, and gazed into the night sky, obscured by clouds that roiled and shifted, a kaleidoscope in shapes and shades of gray. The world was very quiet. Some time later, apartment cool, heart soothed, content and comfortable (except for this aching knee), I returned to sleep quite easily.

Moments are neither magical nor cursed, not really. They are what I make of them, myself, with my choices, my perspective, my baggage… What I do with any given moment is what makes the moment what it seems to me to be. That probably seems crazily obvious. I need the reminders, sometimes. 😉

Yesterday, after plans to hang out with my traveling partner fell through, I found myself inspired artistically, and spent the afternoon painting. My knee is not really happy with me this morning, and I pay that price in continued pain, instead of feeling it eased today. It’s peculiarly a price worth paying, although a wiser voice in my head suggests that had I approached the work differently, I could have also taken better care of this knee while I painted. Choices. Practices. Verbs. I keep at it, and continue to improve on how I approach such things. I don’t get much chance to be smug about successes…if I stop practicing, I generally forget fairly quickly how I was managing something. LOL These days that’s more a humorous inconvenience than any reason to treat myself badly.

I find myself thinking about the vast potential that exists in life – in my life – and how little of that potential I’ve tapped, even though I’ve been wandering around for 53 years on this gigantic jawbreaker hurtling through space. There’s so much more. It’s really no wonder life can seem so busy, or overwhelming, or mystifying. I’ve spent most of my life just bumbling along from one moment to another, occasionally doing some things (or people) I’ve really enjoyed, but without any really clear plan (or map)… and there’s so much to do and learn! I’m grateful there’s no expectation that being intelligent, well-read, or entertaining to know, requires me to learn everything, because… it’s not really possible. At all. Much of what I think I know, when I reflect on it, actually amounts to acceptance of what some other person has discovered, proven, noted, analyzed, stated more clearly, theorized, or observed, and written down, considerately enough, for the rest of us to benefit from. It gets called ‘education’, and I suppose it serves me well enough. I’d love to see particles in motion… I’d love to hear now-dead languages spoken by native speakers… I’d love to visit all the exotic remote places of great beauty, wonder, historical significance, and mystery, in person… Ah, but it’s not about time, or even money, in so many cases the things I have the good fortune to learn about don’t even exist in this moment, at all. How fantastic that I can learn about these things!

Human experience holds so many potential choices, options, circumstances, and perspectives… live a million lives and I would not have lived them all. There are no duplicates. There are no ‘do overs’. There is this fragile vessel, this mortal lifetime, and this very long and varied menu of choices and possibilities.

What matters most? Is it a diagnosis I don’t yet have? Is it a job I no longer work, or am not yet working? Rent? Bills? Housework? Is love what matters most? Or is it… now? This moment? This one pin point in time that gives me the power to choose my adventure?

Choose. Begin again.

Choose. Begin again.

I’ve had some health concerns on my mind lately. Aging seems to have that effect on people. Last night my traveling partner and I really talked through the concerns I have, what’s to be done, and what else if, and etcetera. My simmering stress and anxiety about my health – and frankly, my mortality – spilled over as hot tears. We shared the moment, comforted each other, moved quickly to one really important super obvious detail; I’m okay right now. We both are.

Are you okay?

Are you okay?

There’s literally not actually anything wrong right now. Sure, maybe at some point in the future, in some doctor’s office or another, somewhen, I may be given some sort of medical diagnosis that presents real risk of shortening my lifespan, or degrading my quality of life. Sure could. Hasn’t. Has not happened yet. It’s (playfully) Schrödinger’s Health Concern, being neither a crisis now, of any certainty, nor clearly and most definitely nothing at all. 🙂 My partner’s great (and very reassuring) perspective calmed me way down – as did taking the time to speak together frankly, intimately, and openly about our individual fears (as well as we know how to), concerns, needs, and to share comforting words, and presence. We moved on comfortably to other things, though I’m sure we’re both still thinking about it more often than we’d like.

Love matters most.

Love matters most.

The lovely day today has been a product of good fortune, and good self-care practices, I suppose. I’m dreadfully tired, in the middle of the day. It’s not that strange – I only slept a bit more than 4 hours last night, having stayed up quite late watching a movie. I woke a bit earlier than my usual time, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I spent the early hours on yoga, exercise, and meditation. I went for my walk in the park in the early morning sunshine. It was beautiful. Today has felt ‘easy’, in spite of being short on sleep. Is that due to all the practice, new resilience, good self-care, getting good sleep most of the time, some combination of those things, none of those things – just an unexpectedly effortless pleasant day? (Those exist. They’re lovely.) It doesn’t matter. I enjoy the day quietly. I enjoy it in my garden, and on my patio with coffee. I enjoy it over a few chapters of the book I am reading. I enjoy it while I go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and at the store while I buy coffee. I enjoy the sunshine on my back and the breeze through my hair. I enjoy miles of walking. I enjoy returning home and the opportunity to stop walking, sit down and rest. I enjoy the breathing. I enjoy the thinking. I enjoy the daydreaming. I enjoy the Love. Yeah… just a generally very pleasant day. I sat for a while wondering if some people have a lot of these, and don’t realize that it’s not super common. Then… I wonder if it’s actually quite routine and mundane, and if perhaps I’m the one with the strange experience. Then… I wonder why the hell I am screwing with a lovely sunny summer day with all this strange wondering? So, I enjoy the day.

A summer day as beautiful as a postcard.

A summer day as beautiful as a postcard.

At some point I realized I hadn’t written this morning. I’d forgotten… and then… Well, then I did all that, up there ^^^^^, and here we are. 🙂

The long weekend coming is forecast to be quite beautiful. I’ve a Saturday adventure planned; I am taking the train to a distant farmer’s market, one that I have not been to before. No expectations, besides taking the journey and seeing the sights.

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It’s enough to be, to breathe, to see the sights.

I relax with the moment, and find myself suddenly sleepy. Too late in the day for coffee, far too early to call it a night. Perhaps another walk in the sunshine… Change being what it is, I’ll enjoy what I have now. Summer doesn’t stick around forever, here (at least not in 2016).

I didn’t sleep last night. I’m not sure why. It probably doesn’t matter. The night didn’t seem long, and it wasn’t at all stressful, I just wasn’t sleeping most of the night. I don’t recall being aware of, or concerned about, the passage of time… perhaps I slept and merely dreamed that I was awake? I’m groggy this morning, tending to support my perception of poor quality sleep in limited quantity. Spelling mistakes are more common. My head aches. My eyes feel sticky. I’m not at all cross, yet, but hey – the day is young. I laugh out loud and startle myself with the harsh edge to the sound of it. Hmm… a good day to take care of this fragile vessel.

Sunrise. A chance to begin again, every time.

Sunrise. A chance to begin again, every time.

I cool the apartment while the morning temperatures are low. I sip my coffee. I catch up my email, and follow up on job search tasks. It’s all very organized and systematic, which is almost irrelevant most days of late, these are qualities I am relying on this morning to get me through the day. I find myself easily distracted and a little out of sorts over the practical matter of squinting at my monitor. I notice again that I am overdue for new glasses, and my prescription lens’ clearly need to be somewhat different than they are. The sunshine pours in over the windowsill, spilling across my fingers and the backs of my hands like some exotic liquid. My years are more obvious in the unforgivingly revealing summer sunshine. I smile. These are my hands. They have served me well all these years. It’s quite okay that the years show a bit. I’ve worked hard to get here.

My thoughts are fractured and inefficient. The lack of sleep matters more than I want it to. I find myself struggling to remember something (is it a real something, or have I imagined it?) that I had wanted to do today, or wanted to plan today for some other day, or…something. Perhaps I’ve only imagined it? Perhaps I am thinking of something already planned, now, and confused myself thinking there remains some detail to be planned? Perhaps it is something important – isn’t that the fear? That I’ve forgotten something important? Doesn’t change how the forgetting feels… This vague sense of something missing lingers. lol Perhaps a walk in the early morning sunshine will clear my head, and wake me up? I smile when I notice the time; I am ‘right on schedule’ for my morning walk. Funny how our ‘sense of things’ can so easily sync up with things like time of day, day of week, or seasons… It feels very natural to be preparing to walk right now.

I enjoy living life more or less  unscripted these days. It’s nice to know I can fall back on a  handful of good habits to ‘keep me on the path’, when I am tired, or rushed, or feeling disorganized.

Was it an email I wanted to write, or…? Damn it. I’m still stuck on whatever it is I feel I am forgetting. lol Today is a good day to let it go, and be mindful and present in this moment. I think I’ll do that. 🙂

Yesterday was a pleasant day with a handful of blue moments. The awareness of Father’s Day jockeying for position with the awareness that my father died some years ago was occasionally uncomfortable. It was a pleasant day, anyway. I spent most of the day at home, in solitude, reading, meditating, gardening, maintaining my aquarium, and generally contemplating life. I drank coffee – but not enough to keep me up late.

Pastel twilight, moon rising.

Pastel twilight, moon rising.

Evening came, eventually, and with it the delight of seeing the moon rise, just beyond the patio. I spotted it as I began turning things off to head to bed, and stayed up awhile longer to watch it rise, white and round like some magnificent pearl just out of reach. Totally worth the time taken to relax and watch the moon rise.

A brief lesson in impermanence when the rising moon disappears.

A brief lesson in impermanence when the rising moon disappears.

I slept mostly well, mostly fairly deeply, mostly without waking – or without waking in any significant way, at least. I woke sometime shortly before midnight. Again sometime after 1 am. My wakefulness was so brief, only as much time as needed to check the clock, it seems unfair to count it as not sleeping. lol I woke at a fairly usual time (if I were working), and after taking my medication I returned to sleep. Sleep really matters; if I am still tired, or not feeling rested, and the planned events of the day will permit it, I go back to sleep. This has worked out pretty well for me. Your results may vary. Obviously. We’re each having our own experience. 🙂

It is another lovely day. Is it wasteful to say so? Is it boastful? I’m not complacent about this delicate peace I’ve found within; like any garden, the work to maintain it is ongoing. So many verbs. 🙂

Later this morning, I’ll enjoy brunch with my traveling partner – the idea of brunch for Father’s Day was appealing (we both enjoy brunch out)…but… Father’s Day. Local bistros and breakfast places were definitely going to be packed. Instead of the crowds, we decided on brunch on Monday, instead. 🙂 I am definitely okay with that, since it is about enjoying my partner’s company over a meal, and not at all what date on the calendar we do so.

My coffee is finally cool enough to drink. The morning sun escaped the reach of the clouds on the horizon and shines a good morning flash into my eyes. The marsh and meadow birds celebrate the morning with song, and I watch a chubby raccoon hurrying across the lawn for a safer location now that daylight is here. The raccoon and the neighborhood cats on patrol at the edge of the taller meadow grass studiously ignore each other. There may be very few such Mondays left in my summer; I anticipate returning to the work force next week, most likely, and back to a routine built around 40 hours that are no longer my own. It often feels ‘too soon’…still… there are a few days left, and they are worth enjoying. Today will be a good day to go and do that. 🙂

...And I'll continue to practice the practices that are most effective for me. :-)

…And I’ll continue to practice the practices that are most effective for me. 🙂