Cueillette des champignons

A beautiful video has been going around on Facebook, you might have seen it. It shows in three minutes what happens in a forest over the course of an entire year.

On a background of soothing classical music, pine cones open and release their seeds, snow appears and disappears, to be replaced with snowdrops, May blossoms, summer flowers, wild strawberries, and finally mushrooms... All in three minutes. 

This video made me a bit sad. 

I didn't know why.

This morning in the forest, it came to me that I am reaching for the opposite.

For two months now, every morning, I have gone to the same corner of the same forest. In fact, not just the same corner but the same tree. On the same side. Sometimes I'm there at 9 am, sometimes at noon. Good enough. Every day I sit down in the same spot, with my back leaning against the same fold in the bark, and I sit. 

I don't meditate, I don't pray, I don't do mental yoga. I just sit. I don't try to think, I don't try not to think, I don't watch the birds, I don't try not to watch them. 

I sit. 

To some, this might sound easy, or boring. To me, it's a radical and delicious act.

I sit.

Over the days and the weeks, I am getting to know some of the creatures living in what I already think of as 'my neighbourhood': One obscenely fat curious robin, three tits whose concerts are well worth attending, two woodpeckers who companionably eat from the dead branch of 'my' tree at 9:10 am every morning, two squirrels whose morning exercise routine includes chasing each other up and around  my' tree (and once over my shoulder), and one very (very!) shy wood mouse. 

I would like to say that I see the forest change as the season advances, but I don't. It's all going much much much too slow. Things do look and sound different every day, though. As if I'm there for the first time. Every time. I guess it's hard to synthesise. Or summarise. Or put into three minutes. Or in a blog post.

I'd like to say something wise about it all, but I don't think I have anything wise to say. I just know it's good. What I'm doing. It's good for my soul. And that it takes time. Lots and lots and lots of time. And that for me, right now, taking time for lots and lots and lots of time, to sit in this nothing much that is so rich.... 

... that this creates other oceans of time.

in which to sit some more.

If you go to bed with the children... (continued)

So.... where were we?

Ever since I was precipitated into the maelstrom of motherhood a little over a decade ago, two questions have repeatedly surfaced like scum on the surface of my grey and exhausted mind:

1. How can my babies, who have the exact same nights I do (i.e. broken, broken, and broken some more), wake up in the morning looking and obviously feeling amazingly refreshed, rejuvenated, rested, cheerful and ready for a long adventure-filled day, whereas I (who have the exact same nights they do, i.e. broken, broken and broken some more) wake up feeling like I was run over by a bus, a tram, a train and a construction roller, consecutively and repeatedly? 

(And what idiot ever coined the expression 'to sleep like a baby'???)

2. How could Mother Nature have gotten something this important this wrong? I've mentioned this before, but seriously: How did we manage to survive this long as a species? Our babies require consistent and intensive care for at least four years before they are ready to hit the town on their own and bring home some bacon, yet our babies' mothers drag themselves through life barely able to lift their feet or remember their middle name, let alone forage for and find food ('... Hey, is that a sweet pussy cat or a sable-tooth tiger peeking at me through the bushes?... Don't know. Don't care. I just want to close my eyes for a minute, OK, just one minute!!!!').

Seriously? How, people, how? We should have become extinct aeons ago, all grand-mother hypotheses notwithstanding...

It goes without saying that I did not ponder these questions for very long, due to general bleary-eyed exhaustion, but they did recur. 

Anyway, back to my recent despair, and going to sleep at 7 pm. As soon as I started doing that, things got better, dramatically better, fast. In fact, within a week I felt not just OK, but absolutely bloody fantastic. I would have been the last to admit it, since one can, I have discovered, get quite some brownie points for 'heavy night baby duty', and I was reluctant to let go of my advantage in the perpetual war of the sexes, but looking around, I began to suspect I was feeling 'more rested' than most regular 'rested' people of my acquaintance (the non-baby owners among them).

Which is when we took ourselves and the 'formerly good sleeper' to the local baby check-up station (known as the consultatiebureau). The wonderful woman who runs it looked at the baby, looked at us, and asked: 'How is sleeping going?'. 'Terrible', I said. 'Terrible!' 'He stopped sleeping altogether about two months ago now... Wakes me up every 45 minutes. On the dot. We were hoping you could tell us what is wrong with him...'

She looked at me in a way that made me feel that maybe she had not registered for the secret brownie point system, and said, not unkindly: 'You don't look very tired...'. 'Well that's because I've had to take drastic measures', I blurted out. 'I've been going to bed with him...'

She smiled, folded her hands, and told me the following story: That starting around age 9 months, babies begin to dream in the same kind of way that we do, and that from this point onward, their nights tend to take on the following pattern:

They fall asleep sometime after sundown and sleep very deep for 2.5-4 hrs, without waking up. This first deep-sleep phase is essential to restore their physical functions, repair anything that got damaged during the day, and grow (babies and children grow almost solely at night). This one stretch of deep sleep satisfies all their deep sleep requirements for the night, and they spend the rest of the night doing their other important work, which is to dream their way into processing and integrating every single bit of new experience they had that day. They do so in dream cycles of 45-60 minutes, and most babies, although not all, require some soothing and a dose of sleeping drugs to help them move through the crest of each dream wave into the next one (hence the 45 min. nursing cycle that had gotten me down on my knees in the first place). 

'Ok,' I said. 'But what about  me? What about my needs for deep sleep? What about my basic requirements of 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep???'

'You are not going to like what I tell you next.' said the friendly lady with a friendly smile. 

But she was wrong. 

I loved it! (and readily gave up all my saved brownie points for the privilege of hearing it...)

She said that I (and probably you too, if you happen to be human) have the exact same sleep needs as babies. That I too, need to start the night shortly after sundown with a single period of deep sleep (of 2.5-4 hrs) to repair all physical damage, etc. And then I too need a series of lighter, dream-filled sleep cycles of 45 to 60 minutes to process and integrate my socio-emotional development of the day. 

Here comes the magic bit: In my cheeky workshop materials, I was unwittingly telling the truth when I said babies teach us to sleep, and help us sleep better. Amazingly, they really do. When I synchronize my sleep with my baby's, by going to sleep at the same time that he does, we have our deep sleep phase at the same time, and we ride the waves of dream sleep together, emerging from each at more or less the same time. Every time I nurse him at one of these junctions I get a good solid dose of endorphins, oxytocin and whatever other hormone cocktail night-nursing gives me, which puts me right back to sleep, allowing me to stay in bed, asleep for a full 12 to 13 hours. 

And wake up feeling amazing. Ready to forage and fight the sable-tooth tigers of the modern world...

There, that was quite a lecture, but this has been such a life-changer for me that I had to put it down somewhere, for future use. And for sharing.  

Here is to sleeping like (and with) a baby! Cheers!

If you go to bed with the children... (a medieval formula)

If you go to bed with the children

you will hear the birds sing twice

(in Greek)

Once when the day slips away

and once when it returns

Grey, and drawn, and tired

from wherever it is

that the day spends its nights

I wrote this little poem seven years ago, which is apparently how long it takes my life to catch up with my words...

Does that happen to you too? I say random shit sometimes, here and elsewhere, on bits of paper, through old-fashioned wired telephones, on long windy walks through the dunes, sometimes on screens too... I say shit and I hear myself say it, and I think (occasionally) 'Wow! this is deep shit!' (and deep it often turns out to be, in more ways than one), and then... 

then nothing happens, or so it seems, for a long long time, until months, or years, or decades later, the rest of me finally catches up with the weird futuristic prophet who occasionally visits my head. 

At which point I remember... and go 'Huh???!!!!', and 'Ahaaaa!!!!! That's what I was going on about in the summer of 2010!!' 

(The non-prophetic rest of me is not particularly eloquent by the way, as you can make out from the grunting)

I like to think of it as my Soul dropping shiny pebbles on my path, to goad me on, perhaps. Pretty shiny stones, in brilliant colours, that I collect in my pocket as I walk, and later, much later, take out and go: 'Oh my, but these are rubies!'

It's not a bad way to live. Garnering treasure. Sharing it with people. So here comes...

......

A few months ago, I felt compelled to write, organise and offer a workshop for moms of babies and young children, on sleep. It was called 'Sleep-training for moms 101'. 

I thought I was being funny. As in 'Ha ha!'. 

In a provocative mood, I threw out pronouncements such as 'Instead of trying to teach our babies to sleep, we should learn how to sleep from them.' And 'Babies are the best sleepers in the world!' and 'The baby phase is the time of your life when you can and should feel most rested!' and 'Would Mother Nature have gotten something this important this wrong????' (in reference to the fact that babies would be unlikely to survive for long in the wild if their mainstay dragged herself through the bush bleary-eyed, stuffy-nosed and dysfunctional from exhaustion). 

As I said: I was being provocative. 

The more so as I was feeling a little (tiny itsy bitsy smudge) superior to the poor women who would come to my workshop, bleary-eyed, stuffy-nosed and dysfunctional, since my own baby (the last in a longish series) was, and always had been, what the world would call a 'good sleeper'.

So I offered my workshop. Twice. To a reluctant audience of two.

(this is probably worth another post altogether, but I have noticed that whenever I develop teaching materials from that tiny itsy bitsy superior place, the throngs of interested participants I expect to show up politely ignore me and my offerings. Seriously, what is that??)

A few days after the second workshop, the shit hit the fan... the good sleeper (aka Baby), turned into a demon from hell. Just like that. Overnight, you might say. Except there was no such thing anymore. The night had been cancelled. The night was for wusses. We (the 'formerly good sleeper' and I), were not wusses, he assured me repeatedly. We didn't need no night... Relentlessly, night after night after bloody night, he required my services on the dot, every 45 minutes. I thought it would pass. It did not. I thought it was his teeth. It was not. I thought it was his belly. It was not. I thought it was his psyche (shit knows what goes on in there). Maybe it was... I swore. I prayed. I swore some more. I got tired. Then exhausted. Then bleary-eyed, stuffy-nosed and dysfunctional. In a matter of weeks. 

I cursed the gods. I felt justly punished for my sins (if only I had not been so arrogant teaching that stupid workshop, drawing down upon myself the wrath of the skies...). 

And more of the same. This went on for a month. Until I reached the end of my tether. (You'd think with age, and experience and all that, your tether would get longer. But no, mine grows shorter every year...)

And once I had gotten there, to the end of my tether that is, I did the only thing people ever do in the end: I gave up, and did something insane. 

I went to bed with the baby. 

At 7 pm. 

Not once. Not twice. Not three times. But every single night. 

This was back around Christmas time, an eternity away... and to this day I still go to bed with the baby. 

And this seemingly random, utterly desperate act has changed my mind and life in profound and diverse ways that I can barely begin to describe. 

(... 'barely' indeed... this intro is getting  so bloody long, I'm afraid I have to leave you hanging from a clifflet here, while I go and have some breakfast...)

(to be continued...)

Broken mirror

I had an interesting dream last night, partially inspired by the winter time story series I am listening to with my women's group and which this year centres on Andersen's The Snow Queen.

Remember, the one about the devil's mirror, which when you looked at it showed only the ugliness of everything. And about how the little demons wanted to have fun with their new toy, and flew it around, high above the earth, and how they dropped it (clumsy clumsy demons), and it fell and shattered into a thousand pieces. And how the people found those pieces and put them to good use, for cathedral windows, for regular window panes, for mirrors large and small.

But also how some pieces of the  mirror were so tiny, they would fall like dust specks into people's eyes, or into their hearts...

And about a little boy, Kai, and his friend the little girl Gerda, and how he was stolen by the Snow Queen, and how she helped him to return.

Anyway, a beautiful, profound story, given a whole new layer of meaning by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in the audio series we are listening to.

And the night after I sat by the fire, with my women, listening to this story, and together weaving the winter's dreamscape, one thread at a time, I dreamt this dream, that felt so intense and almost prophetic, that I feel compelled to share it here.

I dreamt that the pain I have suffered from for many weeks now, a sharp pain in my right eye that only comes in the dead of night and is bad enough to have me weeping on my knees (a pain that incidentally deserves an account of its own, that will just have to wait for another post), that this pain was due to the fact that I too, like Kai, had a speck of the devil's mirror in my eye, causing me to suffer, and to only see ugliness and lies in everything.

In the dream I had help, in the form of a team of committed shamans, who took me to Ghana and subjected me to a series of healing procedures (the dream gets a bit vague around this point, but it was none of it too unpleasant I am happy to report) at the end of which they were able to remove the piece of glass from my eye.

At this point I heard a gentle deus ex machina voice (not entirely unlike my car's navigation system) saying: Look around! You can see clearly now, so look around! What do you see?

So I looked around, and what I saw was people, lots of people, children, adults, older people, people on streets, in houses, schools, offices, on buses, in cafés, all of them with their fingers and faces glued to screens of different sizes: phones, tablets, laptops, PCs. Everywhere.

'What do you see?' the deus ex machina asked again. 'What do you see?'

And I saw what I saw.

Pieces of the devil's mirror, in every hand or pocket, on every desk. Shiny pieces of glass, with such  riveting colours and vivid images, promising to show us the world as it really is. In sharpest detail, in brightest colours.

But instead... instead they blind us to the beauty of the ordinary, of ordinary colours (not so vivid, and without back-lighting), of the unedited unfiltered stuff of life around the perfect Instagram shot, of ordinary bodies, ordinary homes, ordinary lives.

They blind us on every level: from the most matter (starving our physical eyes of texture and depth, overstimulating them with otherworldly hues and bright blue light) to the most soul (lulling us away from our only mission ever, which is to be here).

I woke up stunned. And have been reeling since. I knew already that screen-time in my own life is all too often a waste of time. I did not know this. I cannot un-know it now. And I am clueless as to how to proceed.

But clueless is not a bad place (I should know, I spend a lot of time there...). In fact, as far as I know, clueless is the door to every and any sort of adventure....

So... I'll keep you posted.