IS ANYONE ELSE HAVING TROUBLE SLEEPING?
Looking out my window at 2:22 AM, I see a gravestone — a simple, rounded gravestone there in the moonlight at the edge of my garden path. “ Funny I never saw that before. It certainly was not there today!”
It definitely seems to me that it is my own gravestone. I know this intuitively, and I’m not particularly frightened. Just kind of relieved — if you can imagine. Though I don’t want to die anytime soon, I do know where I’m headed.
Recently, I’ve been traversing death-defying sleepless nights, wringing my poor tired body/soul into knots of fear for our Democracy. Wide awake on the high desert of New Mexico (a brief getaway to the Land of Enchantment) instead bombarded with visions of war in Ukraine. Returning home, to thrash around in my own brass bed waiting for the dawn, unable to rest my head and give in to sleep because I felt my palpitating heart would stop beating if I did.
But now seeing my gravestone outside my window, I feel uplifted and calmed and able to breathe. An all-encompassing panic attack in this Age of Anxiety has worked itself through me like a fearsome invading worm. And that dead me out there just might be ignorance and wrong action from long ago which which continues to plague me in the middle of the night. Silly me! That me is dead AND buried out there under what I discover in the morning to be a plastic flower pot the wind lifted from around the corner in order to play this horrid little trick on me. It no longer looks the least bit like a weathered gravestone.
And tonight I sleep the age of innocence in my own bed.
Such an elegant unconscious — ever hard at work.
I awake to internal sunshine — present before my eyes opened to the actual day. Surrounded by soft light — which had accompanied me from dreamscape — I savor lightness more intimate than sunlight, flowing through each cell of my body and filling my mind with sweetest optimism. I was awakening to my baby self — my essential self.
I’m telling you this because it may be important.
The vision we were born with becomes too quickly distorted by the world around us. The pinches, punches and pushes of powerful nay-saying words from those we admire make us small and fearful and (at least in my case) make rebellion the necessary response. Then there’s no relaxing.
As I lay there comfortable in my bed in my soft early morning breathing I am born into the consciousness of, if I was like that then, why not now? I have this vision, perhaps it was a photo I’d seen, of me as a baby sitting in the grass with a delighted smile. Nothing more needed. Goodness inside and out.
If this was me then, why not now?
As I deal with an aging body of aches and subtle pains, in a world of pandemic uncertainty and blatant fear-mongering from frighteningly ignorant politicians. Evil abounds and pessimism certainly doesn’t help!
So I send out this inner light which has never deserted me (for long). I send it to you and to my own children and grandchildren as a point of hope in your busy, distracted lives. Because that’s what I do.
And here is the whispered thought that goes along with it:
Don’t forget the Light you once knew.