i was a tad obtuse, there. sorry.
i do know the answer to all of the questions in the previous post.
they are, respectively, 'both, everything, everything, both, all three, yes and no (and thank you mum!), yes and no, yes and no, yes and no, everything, everything, yes and no, both, yes and no.'
there, i think we can safely say that we have now fully covered this sensitive topic.
(or... maybe, maybe, maybe, these questions were never meant to be answered, but lived.
and maybe, maybe, maybe, that living might well take a life-time.
and maybe, maybe, maybe, that is just as it should be...)
Wednesday 29 March 2017
sea-sick goats
well, well, well... there is a topic....
all right, i confess, the title is a decoy. i just want to talk about sex without attracting anybody's attention (that's why i do it online, of course, as opposed to, you know, in my living-room) (but the people in my living-room don't really want to talk about sex) (with the exception of the starry-eyed teenager) (and the hungry-looking man). oh oh oh...
anyway, i prefer to talk about it here, under the guise of goats. without the risk of being interrupted, contradicted, looked at askance, or drowned in follow-up questions...
so, sex. a tricky topic, wouldn't you say?
yes, i could not agree more. i'd love to say it used to be real simple, but got complicated when i became a mother. that would be food for thought enough, but no, it was always tricky. and keeps getting more so.
the plot only thickens, as we used to say.
the thing is: i simply do not understand sex.
(yeah, yeah, get funny on me... after boyfriends galore, two husbands, four children and forty-two years on this planet, i must know something about sex...) (maybe, but not anything that matters...)
i don't understand what sex is. i don't understand what it's for. and i am clueless as to how/what to do with it.
it's as murky and dark as it ever was. possibly more so...
...
when i was eight years old i decided to think seriously about my future career (well, 'decided' is a big word, it was just that any conversation with a grown-up i didn't yet know like the back of my hand would, sometime in the first thirty seconds, include the question: "So, what do you want to be when you grow up?". Little did I know they were only asking because that same question was haunting them and their unrealised destinies day after night, after day after night. In my innocence, I believed grown-ups were, you know, 'grown up' and that they were already 'doing something'...).
in the span of one year, i decided that i would 'later' become a) a missionary Catholic nun in Burundi, b) a prostitute, c) a general in the Russian army, and d) a writer.
of these, (d) is the only option i confess to these days when people ask me, as they still do, "So..., what did you want to be when you grew up?" (yep, still the same haunted people...)
with the amazing 10/10 vision of historical recollection, i can now see that (a)-(d) were all attempts to understand sex.
(a) was born of my first real crush, Soeur Marie-Sophie, 27 years old, brown as a tanned nut, with a laugh like a secret waterfall. To me she looked and smelled like pure golden sunshine. She descended upon our grey northern village school with tales of lions, jungles and gorillas, and photographs of little dark children sitting on her lap or helping her build 'their' school. i gave all my savings away to Soeur Marie-Sophie and her project, and for years wrote her long letters filled with dreams of the day when i would finally be able to join her.
(b) was what my mother called 'a small misunderstanding'. i had discovered a shelf in the village library devoted entirely to Harlequin romances. based on this abundant source, i became convinced that prostitution was a higher divine calling with good money, flexible working hours, and highly enjoyable duties. i guess someone must have 'put me straight' on that one at some point, but i still feel that in an odd way, this was the closest i ever was to 'getting it'...
(c) what can i say? uniforms are sexy... and i always had control issues.
(d) although this here post is probably the first time i write 'about' sex, i would not, could not, have ever written a word 'without sex'. it is from sex that all writing is born. i know that...
...
so much for archaeology. somehow, all the pieces of the puzzle are right here (have always been here), but i don't know how to put them together.
since those early days, i must have read millions of words about sex (from the bible to leonard cohen lyrics, from pornography sites to academic feminist treatises, from tantra manuals to rumi's poems)
and all i have to show for it are questions. lots of questions.
for example:
is sex something that one does, or something that one is?
and what does sex have to do with god and the divine?
for that matter, what does it have to do with creativity?
is sex something inside me, or is it something that happens between me and someone else?
is it a thing of the mind, of the body, of the soul?
what about sensual pleasure? is that sex?
does that mean there is sex (loads of it) between me and my babies?
can you have sex without touching?
can you have sex without thought?
what happens to sex in motherhood? how is it transformed in the bodies and souls of mothers?
what does it mean to be sexually awake, as a woman, as a mother?
is it possible for a human being to not be sexually awake?
what would that mean? what consequences would it have?
what about orgasm? is it a good thing (like giving birth) or a bad thing (like too much alcohol and sugar)?
is sex something you can give to someone else, receive from someone else, share with someone else? or is it only something you can experience in parallel?
i could go on... i don't know the answer to a single one of these. i don't mean i don't know the answer intellectually (even though i really don't), i mean, much worse, that i don't know the answer in myself.
....
as i was writing this i suddenly remembered myself, aged 13, in the dead of night, scribbling a feverish note with some of these very same questions, addressed to my mum, who would be leaving for work before i woke up, return long after i would have left for school, scribbling away with a sense that it was a matter of life or death that i should know, right now.
i also remember her answer, waiting for me in the morning on the dining-room table, in her beautiful round handwriting, with a thick grey marker and in capital letters. 'Yes and no!', underlined.
....
yes and no.
....
29 years later, and i am still not a farthing wiser...
all right, i confess, the title is a decoy. i just want to talk about sex without attracting anybody's attention (that's why i do it online, of course, as opposed to, you know, in my living-room) (but the people in my living-room don't really want to talk about sex) (with the exception of the starry-eyed teenager) (and the hungry-looking man). oh oh oh...
anyway, i prefer to talk about it here, under the guise of goats. without the risk of being interrupted, contradicted, looked at askance, or drowned in follow-up questions...
so, sex. a tricky topic, wouldn't you say?
yes, i could not agree more. i'd love to say it used to be real simple, but got complicated when i became a mother. that would be food for thought enough, but no, it was always tricky. and keeps getting more so.
the plot only thickens, as we used to say.
the thing is: i simply do not understand sex.
(yeah, yeah, get funny on me... after boyfriends galore, two husbands, four children and forty-two years on this planet, i must know something about sex...) (maybe, but not anything that matters...)
i don't understand what sex is. i don't understand what it's for. and i am clueless as to how/what to do with it.
it's as murky and dark as it ever was. possibly more so...
...
when i was eight years old i decided to think seriously about my future career (well, 'decided' is a big word, it was just that any conversation with a grown-up i didn't yet know like the back of my hand would, sometime in the first thirty seconds, include the question: "So, what do you want to be when you grow up?". Little did I know they were only asking because that same question was haunting them and their unrealised destinies day after night, after day after night. In my innocence, I believed grown-ups were, you know, 'grown up' and that they were already 'doing something'...).
in the span of one year, i decided that i would 'later' become a) a missionary Catholic nun in Burundi, b) a prostitute, c) a general in the Russian army, and d) a writer.
of these, (d) is the only option i confess to these days when people ask me, as they still do, "So..., what did you want to be when you grew up?" (yep, still the same haunted people...)
with the amazing 10/10 vision of historical recollection, i can now see that (a)-(d) were all attempts to understand sex.
(a) was born of my first real crush, Soeur Marie-Sophie, 27 years old, brown as a tanned nut, with a laugh like a secret waterfall. To me she looked and smelled like pure golden sunshine. She descended upon our grey northern village school with tales of lions, jungles and gorillas, and photographs of little dark children sitting on her lap or helping her build 'their' school. i gave all my savings away to Soeur Marie-Sophie and her project, and for years wrote her long letters filled with dreams of the day when i would finally be able to join her.
(b) was what my mother called 'a small misunderstanding'. i had discovered a shelf in the village library devoted entirely to Harlequin romances. based on this abundant source, i became convinced that prostitution was a higher divine calling with good money, flexible working hours, and highly enjoyable duties. i guess someone must have 'put me straight' on that one at some point, but i still feel that in an odd way, this was the closest i ever was to 'getting it'...
(c) what can i say? uniforms are sexy... and i always had control issues.
(d) although this here post is probably the first time i write 'about' sex, i would not, could not, have ever written a word 'without sex'. it is from sex that all writing is born. i know that...
...
so much for archaeology. somehow, all the pieces of the puzzle are right here (have always been here), but i don't know how to put them together.
since those early days, i must have read millions of words about sex (from the bible to leonard cohen lyrics, from pornography sites to academic feminist treatises, from tantra manuals to rumi's poems)
and all i have to show for it are questions. lots of questions.
for example:
is sex something that one does, or something that one is?
and what does sex have to do with god and the divine?
for that matter, what does it have to do with creativity?
is sex something inside me, or is it something that happens between me and someone else?
is it a thing of the mind, of the body, of the soul?
what about sensual pleasure? is that sex?
does that mean there is sex (loads of it) between me and my babies?
can you have sex without touching?
can you have sex without thought?
what happens to sex in motherhood? how is it transformed in the bodies and souls of mothers?
what does it mean to be sexually awake, as a woman, as a mother?
is it possible for a human being to not be sexually awake?
what would that mean? what consequences would it have?
what about orgasm? is it a good thing (like giving birth) or a bad thing (like too much alcohol and sugar)?
is sex something you can give to someone else, receive from someone else, share with someone else? or is it only something you can experience in parallel?
i could go on... i don't know the answer to a single one of these. i don't mean i don't know the answer intellectually (even though i really don't), i mean, much worse, that i don't know the answer in myself.
....
as i was writing this i suddenly remembered myself, aged 13, in the dead of night, scribbling a feverish note with some of these very same questions, addressed to my mum, who would be leaving for work before i woke up, return long after i would have left for school, scribbling away with a sense that it was a matter of life or death that i should know, right now.
i also remember her answer, waiting for me in the morning on the dining-room table, in her beautiful round handwriting, with a thick grey marker and in capital letters. 'Yes and no!', underlined.
....
yes and no.
....
29 years later, and i am still not a farthing wiser...
Sunday 26 March 2017
fox and bear
There is an old Russian tale (or maybe it's one of Aesop's fables?) about Fox and Bear sharing a field. The first year, one day in early Spring, they meet by the edge of the field to discuss what to plant, and how to divide the harvest. Fox's eyes shine with mischievousness as he says to Bear, "Brother, I have such a good idea. I have a sack of grain here, let us plant it in our field and divide the harvest equally among ourselves." "How?" asks Bear. "Well, how about I take all the bits above the ground and you take everything that grows underground?" Bear thinks about it for a while. It sounds fair enough. Come harvest time, Bear slowly shuffles to the field to collect his part of the harvest. But Fox has already been there, and taken all the grain, leaving nothing but bits and pieces of flimsy root for Bear.
Winter comes and goes, comfortable for Fox, hungry for Bear. The next Spring, the two meet again by the side of the field. Fox is carrying a heavy sack of potatoes that he drops at Bear's feet. "Here, Brother," he says. "I have taken care to bring our next crop". Bear is in no mood to thank him. "You cheated me, Brother, but that won't happen again. No, this time you can have whatever grows under ground, and I will take what grows above it...". Fox pretends to look contrite. "Whatever you want, Brother, me, I just want it to be fair and square...".
When the time comes for the harvest, Bear makes his slow way to the field, just in time to see Fox take off towards the forest, laden with bags and bags of potatoes... leaving behind piles of useless toxic greens.
The third year... well, who knows what happened.... the tale doesn't tell. my personal hunch is that Bear found Fox and gave him the beating of his life. Or worse...
i remembered this tale this morning, thinking how often we look for nourishment in the wrong place, at the wrong time. how often we trust the cunning mind when it comes to feeding us. feeding our body, our heart, our soul. and how often the cunning mind cheats us, leaving the body and soul hungry.
where is your food growing today? what would it mean to harvest bountifully from this day? do you need to dig among the roots? search among the greens? do you need to plant something? water something? let your field lie fallow?
what will feed both Bear and Fox in you, today?
Winter comes and goes, comfortable for Fox, hungry for Bear. The next Spring, the two meet again by the side of the field. Fox is carrying a heavy sack of potatoes that he drops at Bear's feet. "Here, Brother," he says. "I have taken care to bring our next crop". Bear is in no mood to thank him. "You cheated me, Brother, but that won't happen again. No, this time you can have whatever grows under ground, and I will take what grows above it...". Fox pretends to look contrite. "Whatever you want, Brother, me, I just want it to be fair and square...".
When the time comes for the harvest, Bear makes his slow way to the field, just in time to see Fox take off towards the forest, laden with bags and bags of potatoes... leaving behind piles of useless toxic greens.
The third year... well, who knows what happened.... the tale doesn't tell. my personal hunch is that Bear found Fox and gave him the beating of his life. Or worse...
i remembered this tale this morning, thinking how often we look for nourishment in the wrong place, at the wrong time. how often we trust the cunning mind when it comes to feeding us. feeding our body, our heart, our soul. and how often the cunning mind cheats us, leaving the body and soul hungry.
where is your food growing today? what would it mean to harvest bountifully from this day? do you need to dig among the roots? search among the greens? do you need to plant something? water something? let your field lie fallow?
what will feed both Bear and Fox in you, today?
Thursday 16 March 2017
shoebox
A few years ago I posted on facebook this photograph of myself as a child. This is what I wrote about it at the time:
'From a treasure trove of never-seen-before (at least not by me) photographs found in my grand-father's house after he died. I think I never realised before to what extent my childhood identity is constructed on the basis of the photographs of my childhood that I know (have always known). These unexpected 130 new 'images' simply do not fit into my idea of who I am/was. Looking at them is an unsettling and deeply delightful experience.
It reminds me of something I read, I think in Knausgard's 'Love', about how as a father of young children it dawned on him one day that his children would create the story of their childhood from a small handful of memories and moments, and that as their father, he would never be able to predict which of the millions of ever-changing moments in their days and years they would pick for this narrative.
Anyway, here you can see that I could dance.'
i felt a need this morning to look at this photograph again. Something to do with the spring weather, the sweetness in the air, the way the woodpeckers are courting each other above 'my' tree.
Something to do with my baby's unadulterated delight in the sunshine, a straw, my dirty trousers on the floor.
Something to do with missing my grand-father, who not only held on to so many photographs, but was also the first and main photographer of my early years. Finding these photographs when I did felt like a gift from beyond the grave.
This morning, it also felt like a wake-up call. I arose from a dream of walking with my grand-father through the forest, compelled to find this photograph, his voice still lingering in my head.
'Look,' he said.
'Look carefully now. What do you see?'
I see bliss.
I have often wondered about the red thread. What is it that has kept with me/by me through the years, the lands, the dreams, the masks, the endless cell regeneration.
What is the thread connecting the pieces, from the child i was to the woman i am?
Based on mind memory, i would have said 'mind', i would have said 'memory', i would have said 'pain'.
Based on my grand-father's dream wisdom and magic eye, i would say bliss.
Bliss is the thread that runs through my life.
(just writing this down makes my heart expand to the size of the Sun)
'Anyway, here you can see that I knew bliss.'
Friday 10 March 2017
thrive
i made a wish earlier this year. my wish was to learn to thrive.
thrive. a word i cannot translate into any other language i speak. one that articulates an intense longing, to find the treasure hidden under the roots of this very life of mine.
i made this wish and sent it off into the world, on the wings of birds and breezes, in the dark moist earth beneath the roots of my garden, among the screeching of seagulls and rustling of shells on the beach.
and then i became quiet, as quiet as i could, and i listened. for an answer.
... it has been coming, finding its way to me, in dreams, in whisperings, in shards, in threads, in shimmerings...
at times it is like peeling an onion, at other times like reconstructing the skeleton of a strange old-forgotten creature, or laying a mosaic, or darning socks.
here are some bits i have collected so far:
Rest and play, all of life nothing but rest and play, wrapped in each other, as a figure-eight, the sign for infinity, a snake eating its own tail. two times rest to one times play. those are the right proportions.
Safety. 'Our sense of comfort and safety arise directly from our experience of our body's ability to regulate its own energy,' says Peter Levine. A revelation...
Enough.... is not as comfortable as one might have hoped (at least at first). and it keeps moving (annoyingly). it's a constantly shifting place between the too little i would give myself and the too much i constantly crave.
Time. Decompressed. Stretched out. Allowed to breathe. I do not understand time. I only know it is not as i was taught. it is not what i was taught.
Fresh water, fresh food, dance, cuddles. Always... but this i already knew.
so much to explore. i think i might write a post about each of these. and whatever else arises. as it does.
but not today.
today the sun beckons...
today time warms up and slows down...
today this can wait...
thrive. a word i cannot translate into any other language i speak. one that articulates an intense longing, to find the treasure hidden under the roots of this very life of mine.
i made this wish and sent it off into the world, on the wings of birds and breezes, in the dark moist earth beneath the roots of my garden, among the screeching of seagulls and rustling of shells on the beach.
and then i became quiet, as quiet as i could, and i listened. for an answer.
... it has been coming, finding its way to me, in dreams, in whisperings, in shards, in threads, in shimmerings...
at times it is like peeling an onion, at other times like reconstructing the skeleton of a strange old-forgotten creature, or laying a mosaic, or darning socks.
here are some bits i have collected so far:
Rest and play, all of life nothing but rest and play, wrapped in each other, as a figure-eight, the sign for infinity, a snake eating its own tail. two times rest to one times play. those are the right proportions.
Safety. 'Our sense of comfort and safety arise directly from our experience of our body's ability to regulate its own energy,' says Peter Levine. A revelation...
Enough.... is not as comfortable as one might have hoped (at least at first). and it keeps moving (annoyingly). it's a constantly shifting place between the too little i would give myself and the too much i constantly crave.
Time. Decompressed. Stretched out. Allowed to breathe. I do not understand time. I only know it is not as i was taught. it is not what i was taught.
Fresh water, fresh food, dance, cuddles. Always... but this i already knew.
so much to explore. i think i might write a post about each of these. and whatever else arises. as it does.
but not today.
today the sun beckons...
today time warms up and slows down...
today this can wait...
Friday 3 March 2017
jumbled ode to the night
For three months now, i have been going to sleep every night at 7 pm and getting up at 7 am, spending twelve hours out of every twenty-four lying in bed, in the dark. You can read about how this came about here and here. Along the way i was joined in this adventure by P. and all four children. A month ago, we took it one step further and decided to make do without electric light after dusk. Without electric bulbs and screens of any kind, our evenings have become gentle candle-lit affairs, of a rather brief kind. Turns out candle-light makes people sleepy...
This adventure, born of necessity (as all real adventures are...), has been a complete life-changer. So much so that i hardly know where to start in sharing with you what this lifestyle tweak has meant for me.
So while i'm collecting my thoughts, indulge me for a moment and let me take you on a tiny excursion through time, back-tracking a little (or way way back), to when the world was young, and we were...
... fishes, crawlies, tree-climbers, four-paw wonders, monkeys, our ancestors... Long before and all the way through the history of our planet, we have all had a profound, indestructible and inalienable relationship with the night.
How could it be otherwise? Night held our lives lovingly cupped in her hands, like parentheses around our beginning and end (Who was not born in and of Night? Who did not return to her in the end?).
And as if that were not enough, Night fell. Every night.
And every night again, she carried us away. Every night she restored, repaired, refashioned us, at her will. There was nothing we could do about it. Nothing but give ourselves over to the mystery, surrender to the waves, and trust that our little boat would make it to see the rising sun. So we huddled together, for warmth, for comfort, we huddled together in the night because the dark can be frightening.
We did not understand the night (who does?), but we knew her. We knew she was dark, rich, moist, mysterious, unknowable. We knew her as our alpha, and our omega, our past and our future, and the shaper of our now. As the dark soil we grew out of and were replenished by. She could steal us away, and miraculously return us to ourselves, seemingly unchanged, but ultimately undone and redone.
We understood her as the great shape-shifting power that ruled over our lives.
For the longest, longest time, our relationship with the Night was like our relationship to gravity. Utterly unavoidable. Utterly dependable. Utterly necessary.
...
But then things went a bit awry... (they often do, have you noticed?) (in fact, you might argue that human history is one long series of things gone awry, for better or for worse...)
Books on the history of sleep disagree (as books do) on exactly when, how and why this happened, but they could have all saved themselves a lot of bother, and just asked me. it happens i know.
It was in 1791. With Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.
This fantastic tale recounts how Prince Tamino and bird-catcher Papageno are sent on a mission to save Princess Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night, from the clutches of the evil Sorcerer Sarastro, only to find out.... that Sarastro is in fact Pamina's father (the original Star Wars plot...), who only abducted her in the first place to save her from the clutches of her evil and murderous mother, the Night. At which point, all male protagonists join forces, the Night is destroyed and the beautiful Princess saved to be married to Prince Tamino and live forever in the light of day in her Father's Kingdom.
It was not called the age of Enlightenment for nothing. European cities acquired street lighting, rich people began to throw balls and parties in the dark (imagine!), and our rational logical anthropocentric world view began to actively encroach on and slowly conquer the dark.
In the Magic Flute, Sarastro stands for the male principle, the day, the light, the sun, ratio, logical thinking and life itself, versus the Queen of the Night, who represents the female principle, the moon, murkiness, death, intuition, superstition and magic.
(and of course, if we are to believe Amadeus, Mozart wrote most of his stuff late at night... while fleeing the dark, running for his life from the terrible nightmares that haunted him......)
We all know how the rest of this story goes. Bit by bit, we collectively reduced the night to its bare minimum, and then took a bit off that too... (figures on the current sleep crisis in the western world suggest that very few people you or i know spend the bare minimum of 7-8 hours in the dark every night).
The night became associated with laziness, wasted time, lack of productivity, an unnecessary death-like disconnection, an anachronism, the last problem to be solved before we can finally take off and soar free (to Mars?).
I remember how it happened for me as a child. When i was little, the night was a massive experience, but as I grew, it slowly shrank back, its wings clipped at both ends. I remember I couldn't wait to be allowed to join the grown-ups in the coveted sanctum of the evening. I knew that was where all the fun and important stuff was happening. So i leaned forward, towards the time when i would be allowed to stay up, until 7, 8, 9, 10, midnight...
On the other end, too, the night was forced to give way: by age 7 my alarm-clock had become chiselled into my life and body, ensuring that i did not lie in bed a minute longer than the system allowed.
In this way, chip by chip, i lost most of it...
...until all that was left was a solid block of uninterrupted deep sleep. Because when you chip enough away from the night, in the end all you are left with is the physiological imperative. The dog-body that must, that will claim its due, whether you like it or not.
Somewhere along the way, i too came to the conclusion that the night was a bit of a sad waste of time. necessary, maybe, but no fun. No significance, no meaning, no treasure.
Fun and treasure and meaning were elsewhere: in the day, and as i grew into an adult and later a mother, increasingly concentrated in the last bit of it: the holy evening.
(...with motherhood, the night itself had been forced into even tighter quarters, and had turned into a hellish struggle for survival as my exhausted body battled with my confused mind for its most basic needs...)
As a mother of babies and young children, my entire life became focused on the evening, my holy of holies, me-time. Time for social contacts, for rest, for creativity, for growth, for learning, for relationship. I filled my evenings (when i could catch one) with interesting watching and reading, yoga, knitting, sewing, writing, painting, sculpting, meetings with friends, games, sex, conversation, meditation, prayer and work.
All activities ultimately intended to help me find that which i longed for and found increasingly and incredibly elusive:
Inner peace, well-being, emotional resilience, joy, equanimity, creativity, deep connection with myself, others and god, purpose, meaning, and magic.
My efforts and iron self-discipline were rewarded to some extent, but i often (often) (too often) felt that i was somehow stuck playing with god's fingers, while missing the moon altogether.
Little did i know (how could i? it was lost so long ago...) that the moon in that metaphor ain't no metaphor...
...
Here then, in the disorder, is everything i have discovered in the past three months about the Night:
- The night is not for sleeping only. Although absolutely essential, sleep is but the tip of the iceberg of what the night has to offer. Once this primal physical imperative is satisfied, the night can have its magical way with me.
- During the day i may 'do life', but at night, there is no doubt that 'life does me'. Agency and control are cancelled. Night is the ultimate surrender.
- I remember how proud i used to be when i remembered a bit of my dream upon waking. I would hungrily write the broken bits and pieces down in my journal, and chew on them during the day, trying like a drunken archaeologist, to reassemble the bones ('the foot bone's connected to the shin bone, the shin bone's connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone...'). It rarely made sense, but i always felt as if i had stumbled on some jumbled treasure, a rare exotic bird briefly glimpsed through the foliage, its shape indistinguishable, but still, the pride in having 'caught it by the tail...'
Now i know that these sightings were nothing. As i spend three sometimes four hours every night with the exotic bird sitting quietly on my shoulder, whispering long stories into my ear, I understand at last that dreams are not meant to be remembered or interpreted in the light of day. They make no sense there, because their language, their meaning is other, and they can only be grasped processed understood incorporated integrated in the night that has borne them and that offers them to me, on a silver platter, night after faithful night. For nourishment.
- A living relation with the night is essential for a living relation with the day. The night, with its timeless expansion and contraction, fuels the day. The two cannot exist without one another. When i skip the night (as i have done for decades) the day slowly loses its colour, its texture, its yumminess, and becomes grey, dull, painful and meaningless. I have found no better (and no other) antidote to this existential malaise than re-entering into a primal living relationship with the night.
- Meditation, therapy, yoga, tai-chi, and all the other amazing techniques i have learnt along the way, when practised regularly and assiduously for a long period of time, all point to the same state I enter effortlessly every single night once my need for sleep is satisfied. They just take a lot more effort, and a lot more time. (Remember the guru asked by one of his students: 'Teacher, what do you think about meditation?'. The guru answered: 'It can't hurt.')
- The Dalai Lama goes to bed at 7 pm every night. Need i say more?
(actually, i do. Need to say more: he was also quoted saying that 'sleep is the best meditation'. And if there is anyone in the world i trust to know the difference between the essential and the superfluous, it's the Dalai Lama...)
(of course, i now understand that the secret behind his (the Dalai Lama's) ability to know the difference between the essential and the superfluous is that he goes to bed at 7 pm every night)
(this is not as circular as it looks...)
- The night repairs and nourishes my body, awakens my sensuality, restores my social relationships, heals my wounds, injects my entire system with magic and creativity, connects me with god, restores my faith, my hope, and my ability to act and be in the world, regulates my emotions, and greatly enhances my ability to shine my light.
- Also, and relatedly, giving the night back its due has allowed me to cancel two thirds of my to-do list. For one thing, anything to do with solitude, me-time, introspection, reflection, writing, creativity, self-development, etc. can now be safely left to the effortless dark. The day has been returned to its original purpose: to jot down the night's harvest (done in a jiffy), and engage in and with the world. For another thing, the night is teaching me to distinguish between the essential and the superfluous (remember those fairy-tales in which the heroine is given the impossible task to sort a pile of dirt and poppy seeds. she always has to do it at night. and the night always sends a helper), and to make a long story short, a lot of stuff on my to-do list, when seen in the light of night, turns out to be more dirt than poppy.
- Relatedly, again, i have experienced an incredible decompression of time. There is now always enough time for everything, seas and seas of it in fact. A strange experience after decades of feeling constantly rushed and late for something (the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, that's my calmer twin brother...), especially since technically speaking, there is a lot less time in my day now.
- All you need to wake up is go to bed.
- Oh, did i mention bliss?
...
this post really wanted to be entitled: How I Cancelled the Evening, Discovered the Night, and Received the Gifts of the Day. but that would have made the above bit of writing redundant, so i didn't let it have its way.
* for some of the science behind the what and why of night magic, see here and here. these are just my first dippings into the incredible wealth of literature and science on the subject. i'll add more links here as i read more.
This adventure, born of necessity (as all real adventures are...), has been a complete life-changer. So much so that i hardly know where to start in sharing with you what this lifestyle tweak has meant for me.
So while i'm collecting my thoughts, indulge me for a moment and let me take you on a tiny excursion through time, back-tracking a little (or way way back), to when the world was young, and we were...
... fishes, crawlies, tree-climbers, four-paw wonders, monkeys, our ancestors... Long before and all the way through the history of our planet, we have all had a profound, indestructible and inalienable relationship with the night.
How could it be otherwise? Night held our lives lovingly cupped in her hands, like parentheses around our beginning and end (Who was not born in and of Night? Who did not return to her in the end?).
And as if that were not enough, Night fell. Every night.
And every night again, she carried us away. Every night she restored, repaired, refashioned us, at her will. There was nothing we could do about it. Nothing but give ourselves over to the mystery, surrender to the waves, and trust that our little boat would make it to see the rising sun. So we huddled together, for warmth, for comfort, we huddled together in the night because the dark can be frightening.
We did not understand the night (who does?), but we knew her. We knew she was dark, rich, moist, mysterious, unknowable. We knew her as our alpha, and our omega, our past and our future, and the shaper of our now. As the dark soil we grew out of and were replenished by. She could steal us away, and miraculously return us to ourselves, seemingly unchanged, but ultimately undone and redone.
We understood her as the great shape-shifting power that ruled over our lives.
For the longest, longest time, our relationship with the Night was like our relationship to gravity. Utterly unavoidable. Utterly dependable. Utterly necessary.
...
But then things went a bit awry... (they often do, have you noticed?) (in fact, you might argue that human history is one long series of things gone awry, for better or for worse...)
Books on the history of sleep disagree (as books do) on exactly when, how and why this happened, but they could have all saved themselves a lot of bother, and just asked me. it happens i know.
It was in 1791. With Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.
This fantastic tale recounts how Prince Tamino and bird-catcher Papageno are sent on a mission to save Princess Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night, from the clutches of the evil Sorcerer Sarastro, only to find out.... that Sarastro is in fact Pamina's father (the original Star Wars plot...), who only abducted her in the first place to save her from the clutches of her evil and murderous mother, the Night. At which point, all male protagonists join forces, the Night is destroyed and the beautiful Princess saved to be married to Prince Tamino and live forever in the light of day in her Father's Kingdom.
It was not called the age of Enlightenment for nothing. European cities acquired street lighting, rich people began to throw balls and parties in the dark (imagine!), and our rational logical anthropocentric world view began to actively encroach on and slowly conquer the dark.
In the Magic Flute, Sarastro stands for the male principle, the day, the light, the sun, ratio, logical thinking and life itself, versus the Queen of the Night, who represents the female principle, the moon, murkiness, death, intuition, superstition and magic.
(and of course, if we are to believe Amadeus, Mozart wrote most of his stuff late at night... while fleeing the dark, running for his life from the terrible nightmares that haunted him......)
We all know how the rest of this story goes. Bit by bit, we collectively reduced the night to its bare minimum, and then took a bit off that too... (figures on the current sleep crisis in the western world suggest that very few people you or i know spend the bare minimum of 7-8 hours in the dark every night).
The night became associated with laziness, wasted time, lack of productivity, an unnecessary death-like disconnection, an anachronism, the last problem to be solved before we can finally take off and soar free (to Mars?).
I remember how it happened for me as a child. When i was little, the night was a massive experience, but as I grew, it slowly shrank back, its wings clipped at both ends. I remember I couldn't wait to be allowed to join the grown-ups in the coveted sanctum of the evening. I knew that was where all the fun and important stuff was happening. So i leaned forward, towards the time when i would be allowed to stay up, until 7, 8, 9, 10, midnight...
On the other end, too, the night was forced to give way: by age 7 my alarm-clock had become chiselled into my life and body, ensuring that i did not lie in bed a minute longer than the system allowed.
In this way, chip by chip, i lost most of it...
...until all that was left was a solid block of uninterrupted deep sleep. Because when you chip enough away from the night, in the end all you are left with is the physiological imperative. The dog-body that must, that will claim its due, whether you like it or not.
Somewhere along the way, i too came to the conclusion that the night was a bit of a sad waste of time. necessary, maybe, but no fun. No significance, no meaning, no treasure.
Fun and treasure and meaning were elsewhere: in the day, and as i grew into an adult and later a mother, increasingly concentrated in the last bit of it: the holy evening.
(...with motherhood, the night itself had been forced into even tighter quarters, and had turned into a hellish struggle for survival as my exhausted body battled with my confused mind for its most basic needs...)
As a mother of babies and young children, my entire life became focused on the evening, my holy of holies, me-time. Time for social contacts, for rest, for creativity, for growth, for learning, for relationship. I filled my evenings (when i could catch one) with interesting watching and reading, yoga, knitting, sewing, writing, painting, sculpting, meetings with friends, games, sex, conversation, meditation, prayer and work.
All activities ultimately intended to help me find that which i longed for and found increasingly and incredibly elusive:
Inner peace, well-being, emotional resilience, joy, equanimity, creativity, deep connection with myself, others and god, purpose, meaning, and magic.
My efforts and iron self-discipline were rewarded to some extent, but i often (often) (too often) felt that i was somehow stuck playing with god's fingers, while missing the moon altogether.
Little did i know (how could i? it was lost so long ago...) that the moon in that metaphor ain't no metaphor...
...
Here then, in the disorder, is everything i have discovered in the past three months about the Night:
- The night is not for sleeping only. Although absolutely essential, sleep is but the tip of the iceberg of what the night has to offer. Once this primal physical imperative is satisfied, the night can have its magical way with me.
- During the day i may 'do life', but at night, there is no doubt that 'life does me'. Agency and control are cancelled. Night is the ultimate surrender.
- I remember how proud i used to be when i remembered a bit of my dream upon waking. I would hungrily write the broken bits and pieces down in my journal, and chew on them during the day, trying like a drunken archaeologist, to reassemble the bones ('the foot bone's connected to the shin bone, the shin bone's connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone...'). It rarely made sense, but i always felt as if i had stumbled on some jumbled treasure, a rare exotic bird briefly glimpsed through the foliage, its shape indistinguishable, but still, the pride in having 'caught it by the tail...'
Now i know that these sightings were nothing. As i spend three sometimes four hours every night with the exotic bird sitting quietly on my shoulder, whispering long stories into my ear, I understand at last that dreams are not meant to be remembered or interpreted in the light of day. They make no sense there, because their language, their meaning is other, and they can only be grasped processed understood incorporated integrated in the night that has borne them and that offers them to me, on a silver platter, night after faithful night. For nourishment.
- A living relation with the night is essential for a living relation with the day. The night, with its timeless expansion and contraction, fuels the day. The two cannot exist without one another. When i skip the night (as i have done for decades) the day slowly loses its colour, its texture, its yumminess, and becomes grey, dull, painful and meaningless. I have found no better (and no other) antidote to this existential malaise than re-entering into a primal living relationship with the night.
- Meditation, therapy, yoga, tai-chi, and all the other amazing techniques i have learnt along the way, when practised regularly and assiduously for a long period of time, all point to the same state I enter effortlessly every single night once my need for sleep is satisfied. They just take a lot more effort, and a lot more time. (Remember the guru asked by one of his students: 'Teacher, what do you think about meditation?'. The guru answered: 'It can't hurt.')
- The Dalai Lama goes to bed at 7 pm every night. Need i say more?
(actually, i do. Need to say more: he was also quoted saying that 'sleep is the best meditation'. And if there is anyone in the world i trust to know the difference between the essential and the superfluous, it's the Dalai Lama...)
(of course, i now understand that the secret behind his (the Dalai Lama's) ability to know the difference between the essential and the superfluous is that he goes to bed at 7 pm every night)
(this is not as circular as it looks...)
- The night repairs and nourishes my body, awakens my sensuality, restores my social relationships, heals my wounds, injects my entire system with magic and creativity, connects me with god, restores my faith, my hope, and my ability to act and be in the world, regulates my emotions, and greatly enhances my ability to shine my light.
- Also, and relatedly, giving the night back its due has allowed me to cancel two thirds of my to-do list. For one thing, anything to do with solitude, me-time, introspection, reflection, writing, creativity, self-development, etc. can now be safely left to the effortless dark. The day has been returned to its original purpose: to jot down the night's harvest (done in a jiffy), and engage in and with the world. For another thing, the night is teaching me to distinguish between the essential and the superfluous (remember those fairy-tales in which the heroine is given the impossible task to sort a pile of dirt and poppy seeds. she always has to do it at night. and the night always sends a helper), and to make a long story short, a lot of stuff on my to-do list, when seen in the light of night, turns out to be more dirt than poppy.
- Relatedly, again, i have experienced an incredible decompression of time. There is now always enough time for everything, seas and seas of it in fact. A strange experience after decades of feeling constantly rushed and late for something (the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, that's my calmer twin brother...), especially since technically speaking, there is a lot less time in my day now.
- All you need to wake up is go to bed.
- Oh, did i mention bliss?
...
this post really wanted to be entitled: How I Cancelled the Evening, Discovered the Night, and Received the Gifts of the Day. but that would have made the above bit of writing redundant, so i didn't let it have its way.
* for some of the science behind the what and why of night magic, see here and here. these are just my first dippings into the incredible wealth of literature and science on the subject. i'll add more links here as i read more.
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