Category Archives: sleep

A Hundred Days of Solitude: chpt 6

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Blake is still just sleeping.

Day 150: but whose counting?

I could actually go out according to stage 3 rules of pandemic. I could go to a bar. I like sitting at Cagney’s with a glass of Butternut Chardonnay. With a book. At the short end where there is just enough light to read. Three guys will be sitting in the middle of the long side, separately, one talking to the owner, another flirting with the barmaid. Cagney’s is a Greek restaurant, oddly, and the owner goes to California to get wines no one else imports. It was tough discovering in the early days of the pandemic shut-down that this was the only hobby which got me out of the house. It was tough that the bars were closed for nearly five months. It was also tough that I had to stop drinking. Something about medication and continual dizziness.

But I don’t. Go out.

I get dizzy listening to the statistics. We are leveled off here in Toronto, fewer cases, fewer deaths. For now. I’ve given up keeping track of the deaths and hospitalizations in the U.S. I packed it in around 100,000 departed souls. No the statistic that bothers me is the one that tells me my chances of succumbing. I am 84 and apparently have a 75% chance of surviving. That seemed like good odds when I had cancer. Not anymore. Surviving Covid-19 is an adventure I want to skip. If I want to drown, I’ll just jump in the pool, I’m that bad a swimmer.

So I stay in. Except for weekly early seniors’ hour at the supermarket.

I spend the better part of an hour every day in the mountains of Kern County, California. Via Facetime. My daughter calls every day, realizing that I’m in solitary for my own protection. I know the place well and some of the people and I have her catalogue what’s she’s doing  there. The mornings are getting cold at 6000 ft. Autumn already on the wind. And some days I spend Facetime in a suburb of Brussels, which has seen a rise in cases and less freedom of movement. My brother’s bubble seems to be quite large, but as I reported in chapter 2, he also seems to have had Covid. I see my sister up the street a few times a week without aid of device, but we thrash over Trump every night on the phone. We should be suffering over our Prime Minister’s charity scandal, but the fate of the world is not riding on it. (The first 5 posts are available at 115journals.com.)

Last time, I talked about my idea of destiny https://115journals.com/2020/07/30/a-hundred-days-of-solitude-chpt-5/

In that post, I proposed the idea that we signed up for our roles in life before we undertook incarnation, and that as bits and pieces of God, we had a role in planning events as well. I pondered whether some souls put up their hands to play bad guy. It seemed to me that all types of experience were necessary throughout our many incarnations.

(There are several references in the Bible to reincarnation which the early censors failed to catch.)

I talked to a friend about this idea and she was equally convinced that souls fell into the role of villain through lack of awareness. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Soygal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and  Robert Thurman’s Infinite Life among other books teach us the stages of dying, usually pictured as different kinds of light ending in the vast clear light of consciousness. It is essential to see that light in order to choose your next reincarnation wisely. Confused souls are swept willy-nilly into the next life. This is the way people find themselves incarnating as foundlings who grow into psychopaths or bad painters who found evil empires or rich boys who are given no love or spiritual grounding and become men without empathy. These books encourage us to meditate on this path to clear light so we are prepared when the time comes.

I find that I can’t even keep the stages in order and my experience with death tells me that it’s not  the only route. My father, who was the foundling, was not even likeable and even thoroughly evil and yet, I loved him. Before he died, he made an act of contrition, calling each of the children he could get hold of and saying ‘Sorry’.  I watched his cruel death. While many others wished him in hell, I knew that heaven makes no judgement. He had put in his time in hell on earth, as most of us do. I knew that he had been welcomed and that his nature there was as pure and good as it had been when he was born in a New Hampshire work house and sold to a ‘nice couple’. Years after his death, he appeared at the bedside of a loved one who was in the grip of acute psychotic terror. He assured her he was there to protect her. It was he, of course, who had caused the terror when she was a child.

In another case, a young-gish woman died in a state of rage, which no doubt prevented her from sorting out firefly light from moonlight or clear light. Almost instantly, several of us were aware of a great love she was sending back to us. We had striven to help her on her way, but the people closest to her fastened on her anger and grieved without consolation.

And then there was Blake, my ex-husband, whom we sat beside for ten days. He was grumpy with his pain and childlike, still arguing that he should be able to drive when he got out of hospital. Eventually, he sank into a sort of coma. We didn’t stop talking to him. The ‘girlfriend’, who said old men disgusted her, got into arguments with staff and had to be led away for private chats. His son and step-daughter talked to him and held his hand. I read him Rumi poetry and sang when we were alone. On the last day, we were all 4 there, telling stories about him. He could be very funny, sometimes intentionally. So we laughed a great deal. And cried too. As his executor, I was ready for my final duties, but when he shuddered out that last breath, I lost it. I could barely remember how to dial the undertaker, I was so shaken, So shaken, that I forgot his clothes and he went to the fire wearing a blue hospital gown.

My sister reported that he made an aerial pass through her living room that night, blue gown flying, clearly in bliss. The next glimpse we got of him, he was hurrying off to an advanced physics class, completely absorbed in his tablet and books.

Blake was not spiritually woke in his last years. He had some dementia. He left me his confirmation Bible, which he never, ever read. I have the King James Bible, the New English Bible, the NIV Study Bible and the Amplified Bible, so he thought I was the right recipient. He knew that to me the Bible was literature. He left his fervent wishes for Bernie Sanders, who was still in the running, and a colossal mess in his home and his affairs. I have cursed him many times as we sorted it out, but Blake is preparing to come back and implement a universal wage. Presumably, he will branch into advanced economics next semester.

Which is to say, with all due respect to the Dalai Lama, the Rinpoches and Thurman, that there are many ways to pass and not get swept into the gutter next time.

Having helpers is useful. I have chanted with the Taoists for the departed. I have lit candles and prayed by myself. During the pandemic, I have been very conscious of the dying and the dead. There is an army of us thinking and praying for them. And Angels. I worried initially about dying sedated on a ventilator. No worry now. I’ve opted out. DNR. At the worst, I’d just die sedated. Now I think it doesn’t matter. We don’t need religion to show us the way. And we don’t need to be there with a check list: “there goes the moonlight, clear light coming up.” We don’t even need mental health, although the one necessary thing may lead to that. All we need is love.

 

 

 

Winter Solstice 2019

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Saturday, December 21, 2019, 8:19 p.m. is the Winter Solstice -the shortest day of the year, about 9 1/2 hours of light and the longest night. Today the year turns and tomorrow will bring more light. The following poem was written in Venice Beach, California on the Winter Solstice in 1993, a long way from the mountains of my childhood in the Eastern Townships, Quebec, Canada, but not so far from these Kern County mountains where we expect snow again.

Winter Solstice

Such deep dark
so long sustained
should smell of balsam,
cedar, pine,
should have a canopy of icy stars,
of Northern lights,
shifting panes of white or green.

-A child under a buffalo robe
watching a sleigh runner
cut through blue
moon-shadowed snow
sees a rabbit track running off
into deep woods.-

Waking in the depth
of this longest night,
thirsty for sleep,I hear
the pounding surf,
an angry wordless shout
one floor below
and the reverberating slam
of a dumpster lid.
The sky at least is quiet:
a star hangs
above the flight path.

In my long sleep,
I have been following
that track back
into the woods
breathing spruce pitch
and resined pine,
lashed by boughs of evergreen,
until I have arrived at this
secret place
which only wild things know,
a place to shelter
while things end,
time unwinds,
the circle turns.

When we awaken,
shouting, homeless,
single and bereft,
we will go forth
into the growing light,
a light
we creatures of the dark
must yet endure.

This is the place,
now is the time
for the birth of the Child
in the cave of the heart.

The Cure for PTSD Terror: you’re soaking in it

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This post may trigger PTSD sufferers.

In our search for mental health care, we once sat in a Kern County, California, mental health clinic listening to a psychologist exclaim that our patient could not have PTSD because she had never served in the army.

In fact she had been conscripted at birth as all the rest of the family had, and our sergeant major was a bat-shit crazy man, known initially as daddy and later as grandfather. His sadist attacks were so traumatizing that we dared not reveal them even had we been able to remember. So it was that the patient had been repeatedly taken back to that house of torture by her mother, the author of this blog.

(To be fair, mother could not recall that her own life had almost ended when the b-s crazy man raped her as a child. And she has spent the last 30 years since b-s crazy man died and she did remember, in profound guilt and grief. But enough of personal angst.)

Suffice to say Dad could have given the North Koreans or even the CIA lessons in torture or a 2.0 course in mind control. He himself had rather an unpleasant death, which I describe at the end of my e-memoir, Never Tell, recovered memories of a daughter of the Temple Mater. joycehowe.com

That’s the back story as to why the patient developed suicidal impulses and then intractable insomnia. For most of her life, she was able to repress the trauma, going so far as to contend that the rest of us experienced it, but she didn’t. This was lucky, because by then we had put in years of dealing with it, worn out therapists and come to realize that terrifying as it is, the past is dead and gone.

As, by the way, were quite a few people outside the family, who encountered our very own psychopath. And, no, a million dollar police investigation, involving three police forces couldn’t prove that.

How to deal with such insomnia? Even the strongest drugs couldn’t put her to sleep for long. In one 5 day hospital stay, five other drugs were tried. The fifth one precipitated a heart attack. So we cast about for other methods.

Finally last April, I concluded she couldn’t sleep because she was afraid to dream.

At one point, she fled to Toronto and her loving mother’s arms. I would sit at her bedside until she fell asleep, sometimes for 90 minutes. It is a moving experience to sit in the dark beside someone you love as she does her best to sleep. Going to sleep for her isn’t easy, but it is easier than staying asleep. I wasn’t up to being there at 4 a.m. when she usually comes wide awake. Or 3 am or 2 am. Sometimes she doesn’t sleep at all, just lies in a semi-conscious state, which surprisingly can generate bad dreams.

While I was studying the NICABM (National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine) Treating Trauma Master Series , I came across the idea that therapists don’t do their clients any favours by trying to make them feel safe. That is a technique that Grandad and hosts of his fellow abusers use. Trying to make the trauma survivor relax is an immediate trigger – they want to run a mile.

Our patient came at the idea from a totally different angle. She watched a terrifying movie, went to bed late and slept like a baby.

We reached the conclusion that, instead of avoiding fear, she (we in fact) had to soak in it – like that Palmolive dish detergent commercial years ago where the woman is in the nail salon -“You’re soaking in it”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bEkq7JCbik

We are in the research phase. Our patient has spent the last several months reading about psychopathic serial killers and watching shows like The Mindhunters. The Mindhunters interview serial murders in prison in order to understand them. Patient reports that the single scariest scene so far was one in which the woman on the mindhunter team was at home in her apartment at night wearing only a long  man’s shirts and pouring herself a glass of wine at the kitchen counter. She was at the left of the shot. The right side showed the rest of the kitchen and hall, an empty floor. An absolutely terrifying space. Into which something could suddenly come. I myself found the next scene where she goes down to the building’s laundry – still dressed only in the shirt – and while the washer starts, hears a cat meowing outside the open basement window and decides to feed it her leftover tuna. I will not divulge what eventually comes through that window.

Who says recovering from PTSD can’t be fun?

I’ve always hated Hallowe’en and horror shows, but now I begin to see their value. We can’t evade our terror. It may be buried, but it’s there, so we might as well face it, embrace it as far as possible. We don’t need to defy it. We can acknowledge it and even say this is what made me who I am. We can say, ‘I have been to the edge of death more than once, but I can still permit myself to sleep’. At least six hours most nights.

And of course, we can refuse to put ourselves in real life situations with people that scare us.

See also https://115journals.com/2013/10/18/the-cure-for-pain/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blake No More

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Blake 2 days before he fell off his perch

Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me
Let there be no moaning off the bar
When I set out to sea.

Tennyson

Blake’s last day was devoted to breathing. Three, sometimes four, of us sat beside his bed listening to his breath. We told Blake stories. We laughed quietly. How amazingly, infuriatingly complicated this man had been. How persistent he was even now in spite of agonizing pain that fentanyl and morphine could not entirely subdue, in spite of his failing mind and his inability to communicate.

The nurses came often to keep him comfortable. The doctor came to talk to us. The Salvation Army Chaplain stood quietly with us. We took turns going out to eat. We told more stories.

Blake’s breathing changed. There were long pauses when we thought the worst – or the best depending on your point of view. As the light began to fade over Bloor and Church, there was one last breath. We waited. We nodded to each other. We put comforting hands on his body. We wept silently. After a while one of us went for the nurse.

6:45, Monday, March 19, 2019

There was a glorious red sunset as I rode westward home.

Other posts about Blake and his relentless efforts not to fall off his perch are available at 115journals.com

 

Thanks Giving in Buffalo Wallow

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Of course, I’m not really in Buffalo Wallow, which must be somewhere in flatland. I’m up here on a pine mountain in the ancient land of the Chumash, who regarded it as the center of the world. Apparently, a Chumash trickster spirit, Coyote, or whatever he calls himself has been toying with us, so my gratitude this day is a little skewed.

I am grateful that Ikea’s designated delivery company finally delivered the bed. I bought it on Oct 23 by phone while I was still in Canada. I was told the first delivery date possible on this remote mountain in California was Nov. 8. This remote mountain is 40 minutes up the I-5 from the Ikea distribution center in El Tejon. While I slept on a mattress on the floor, my bed sped past me down the I-5 and came to rest in a warehouse south of Los Angeles, where it sat in a tight roll and disassembled pieces. Meanwhile my 82-year-pld body lay in a tight roll trying not to disassemble in agony. I missed the delivery date – they had been phoning my Canadian landline, but I am grateful that they delivered it on Veterans Day. I am also grateful that my daughter’s good-man-good assembled it with only minimum  damage to his body. So he says. I try to believe him.

It is 10 days later, my body is beginning to unwind.

Meanwhile, Mr Coyote’s trick involved a whole raft of medical specialists – general surgeons, radiologists, ear, nose and throat fellows, urologists, neurosurgeons, pain specialists, and a raft of CT scans, x-rays, MRIs, blood tests, cell cultures and biopsies. The diagnosis was kidney cancer, then metastatic kidney cancer, then benign tumor and early stage kidney cancer, then two benign tumors, one kidney, with a dissenting vote from the radiologist, who’s still got his money on the big C.

Update: a neurosurgeon has removed one tumor and it seems as though years of sciatic pain and months of insomnia have been cured. So thank you, Dr. Liker and all those friendly nurses at Henry Mayo.

Next stop, the urologist.

 

 

 

All is Well: differential diagnosis

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115journals.com/2018/10/06/all-is-well-another-contradiction-to-despair/

In the middle of October, I posted “All is Well”, another contradiction to despair. Events overtook me and I posted “Interval”, promising to post “All is Well: part 2”.

I will begin by explaining the difference between renal cell carcinoma and fat poor angiomyolipomas, so far as I understand it. The latter, also referred to as AMLs – not to be confused with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (that’s someone else’s nightmare) – are made up of blood, muscle and fat. Ours was spotted incidentally during an unrelated CT scan. It was a 4.1 cm. mass in the right kidney.

Did you know renal carcinomas can be diagnosed visually? So three weeks ago we got the bad news – kidney cancer. But wait a minute, the real target had been a 3.8 mass in the hip on the same side. Could be metastatic kidney cancer.

Honestly did not know I was capable of howling loud enough to alarm my neighbors.

But, stat, there was an MRI guided biopsy of the hip lump. Hip tumor not cancer. Rather a schwannoma, a tumor of the nerve sheath, in this case on the sciatic nerve and, in this case, benign.

Can there be kidney schwannomas ,we asked the Google gods. Possibly.

Let’s do another scan, stat of course, to see what is going on in adjacent organs – I imagine this one as High Def – and get a good look at the kidney interloper. Two days later, a voice mail message. Not cancer, but a fat-poor AML.

We had got used to the worst – every day terror, bleak future, all that good stuff. Hearing the no-cancer news, I had to put my head between my knees. One of us fell to cursing. The patient cried.

For three weeks, we had followed doctor’s instructions: prepare for the worst, maybe 17% survival in 5 years, gone in her early 60s. Then, when it was just kidney cancer, not metastatic we had a 96% chance. Now, we were back to 100%, or as close as you can be, given traffic on California freeways. We should have been happy, but we went around muttering, “It’s Tuesday, it must be cancer.” “It’s Thursday, it certainly isn’t.” “It’s Friday…”

We didn’t trust any doctor and certainly not a radiologist. The current one still wanted to call it cancer, despite a visible few fat cells. What we read, and we read everything, told us carcinomas had no fat. A radiologist in 2012 had reported that a tumor of 3.8 cm appeared on the left kidney. We ordered the CD record of it. Definitely, on the right. The radiologist had reverse-read the kidneys. If he had not, we would never have fallen for this funny little trick Nature sprang on us.

Lucky us. Lots of patients have discovered only after they’ve lost a kidney that they didn’t have cancer.

This morning, the urologist assured us that the offending growth will be biopsied when it is removed. When will that be? Well, first the main player, pain-wise, has to go. Simple to cut a schwannoma off a sciatic nerve, just don’t cut too close or -bingo- a different crisis here in Kern County. Recovery will take 2 days. When the patient feels better, she can call and get the kidney surgery date.

The issue of getting something to kill the pain is another whole drama. Governments make doctors’ lives hell when they prescribe opiate-type drugs. As far as I can see their draconian rules have not made a dint in the opioid crisis as yet. The neurosurgeon breezily suggested a pain clinic. Wait times for pain clinic appointments are at least 30 days. We live near an opioid addicted town, we might get lucky on a street corner. But, no, the urologist came through for the next 5 days. Not the same effective painkillers, not nearly as effective and rife with side effects. Weeping over the phone to the pain clinic got us an appointment in 5 days. And this is a temporary need, until surgery, for someone who can’t get up off the couch most days.

I am Canadian. We have the same struggles with diagnosis and waiting for surgery. I once waited for 7 weeks to have an intestinal carcinoid removed. I could eat only fluids or runny pureed veg. Great slimming diet. I was prescribed liquid morphine. But I absolutely never had to think about cost. Not true in California, even with Medicare.

This is a wonderful country, don’t get me wrong. Driving up the I-5 from the neurosurgeon’s, I remembered that, if California were a country, it would be the 5th largest economy in the world. But *#@! it, why doesn’t it take care of its people. My great nephew in Belgium had a 15 hour surgery on his brain, lived to tell the tale and got no bill.

Next up: insomnia of 10 months duration.

“All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well”

 

Drunkenness: probably NOT a contradiction to despair

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It’s quarter after 3 and there’s no one in the place
‘cept you and me
So set ’em Joe
I got a little story I think you oughtta know….. (Harold Arlen/Johney Mercer)

(Frank Sinatra,melancholy, on a bar stool -the apotheosis of melancholy, too romantic to be despair. Tears in my beers).

It was quarter to 4, when I woke up. It’s inching toward 5:15 dawn now. No big deal. A friend of mine hasn’t really slept for six months. I just logged 4 hours. She sometimes gets only 2, although there are signs she’s moving out of Winston Churchill territory. Five hours seems doable to her now.

What better time than the tail-end of the night to contemplate drunkenness.

For the past few days of global chaos, I have been reading Ken Bruen’s last two Jack Taylor crime novels, The Emerald Lie and The Ghosts of Galway. When I say ‘last’, I mean adieu Jacko, at least that’s what the author has implied in interviews. From the condition of the man, it’s no wonder. He has suffered so many vicious attacks as a Guard and a private eye that he is a physical wreck -lame, deaf, with mutilated fingers, and a heart full of grief. All of his friends and even his dogs meet dreadful ends because of him. Well, not even Bruen is heartless enough to eliminate every last one. Maybe there is a short story that will clear up the oversight. Jack drinks! He likes a Guinness and a Jameson chaser. He likes the Guinness built just right. In the right mood, he can lose months of his life to these libations and then months more to the aftermath.

He can’t go into a bar without someone, usually a woman, with a wad of cash, sidling up to him and saying, “You’re Jack Taylor.” It may be a simple job, like ‘find my lost brother’ -who is entirely fictional, but more often as time has gone on, it has been ‘Look what this bastard did to my girl. Get me some payback.” Payback gets gotten, although not always by Jack. Jack’s a hurley stick man, but others in his orbit use more lethal means.

Jack is a good man, his landlady says early on and his good friend, the outside nun, later on. He is a keen man for justice, humanized by reading and music and his love of dogs and swans. He has been hardened by his “walking bitch of a mother with her tame priest”, by the corruption of the church and  the government, by the miserable poverty attendant on the collapse of the Celtic Tiger and, perhaps most of all, by the water tax.

Suffice to say Bruen knows from PTSD.

The Irish have a reputation for enjoying a drop. I do not say drunkenness. Who am I to judge? I lived with Connor for many years. He gave up martinis every Lent. I lived in hell for 40 days each spring. I have a beloved relative, Colin, who is more sensible and less church-ridden. He says of his year-round habit, “Mostly ice,” as he pours his Bombay Gin. Vermouth doesn’t even get to breathe on the glass. Both get loquacious, even argumentative. I got many a cooking lesson in front of guests from Connor. Neither fall down or pass out or miss work.

I find it hard to read the Joe Nesbo books where Harry Hole descends into drunkenness and heroin. But then some experiences have to be first hand: sex is another one. And Harry is needed sober and strong back in Norway.

College binge drinking lost its glow for me before I got out of high school. Just that one, totally horrible, unable-to-feel-appendages experience put me right off. The stag and doe parties that I see depicted on Brit telly and which apparently happen here as well are not my cup of booze. I also had a terrible experience with a brownie on my niece’s 50th. That  limited my appreciation of getting high for good and all.

I know I drink too much wine for a person of my age and constitution. A 6-oz-glass puts me in legal jeopardy, although drinking in solves that problem. Drinking alone? Get real.

(A librarian once told my daughter never to eat while reading. My daughter was outraged, “You have to eat, you know.)

So the flaming world is falling apart. The leader of the free part is tailoring his actions to please 30% of his country. They don’t seem to be terribly well-informed about historical precedent. They don’t seem to know much geography and certainly even less economic theory than the rest of us. Which is saying something! They can’t tell a good guy (Canada) from a bad guy ( Russia). They claim to be helpless to prevent child massacres on their home soil. To them, children separated from parents and locked in what sure do look like kennels if not cages, brought that on themselves, and can damn well show up in court to coo or babble their own defense – in Spanish.

Who wouldn’t drink?

The most drunken person I ever met was my Aunt Mae. She was drunk on the love of Jesus, and joyfully swept all and sundry up in her ecstasy. Also she wouldn’t say no to a nip of brandy.

Jesus and I fell out one time.

Yet I know that what woke me up this night and what is keeping me awake is fear and self-restraint and that the answer is release.

Coleman Barks organizes some of Rumi’s poems into ‘Tavern Madness’ in Rumi: the Book of Love. The tavern is a place where passion breaks loose, an excited place where one is out of one’s mind, with others.There is the shared sense of the presence flowing through. We are connected. We are one, present and absent at the same time. I love the poem that says
I didn’t come here of my own accord
And I can’t leave that way
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.


It reminds me that something has charge over me. Whatever that is will see me safe home.When I read that, I remember I am not alone in passion or rage or goodness or hope or despair or terror. Whether what holds us together is DNA or Soul, it is universal and wise enough, drunken enough, to triumph.

In the meanwhile raise a glass – soda water with or without lemon will do. Drunkenness, O Necessarily Sober One, is fundamentally not about alcohol.

(Full disclosure: my biological grandfather, who hailed from the Emerald Isle, died syphilitic  in New Hampshire madhouse. But may have been teetotal.)

 

 

 

 

Serendipity: contradicting despair #3

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Serendipity: the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident

I’m back in the mountain village in South Cal that I write about in these blog posts and in my mystery Hour of the Hawk. joycehowe.com

When I arrive, I usually stay at the house in the pines for the first few nights, before moving to the other mother’s house. The house in the pines is the abode of our children. We are the mothers or the mother-in-laws. They are happily married and my moving after a few days enables them to stay that way.

In the house in the pines, I sleep on a mattress on the floor for the sake of my back. Last night, I was reading Masaryk Station by David Downing, rereading really, but that’s neither here nor there, when a tiny black shape scuttled under the door and flattened itself against the wall.

I processed this information, fixing it with my gimlet eye.

We knew we had a mouse and, apparently, one that could spring a trap and escape. I had mouse experience, although not recently. Mice don’t  seem to climb 14 floors. I knew mice of old as long and narrow, fast moving critters that induced shudders. This mouse was not like that. Sitting, it was more of a triangle with large rounded ears. Cute as all get out.

It was in the right house.  MIckey had been the founder of the feast. MIckey Mouse artifacts and High School Musical Awards adorned the place. Walt Disney’s cute little guy and his immense studio had been in at the rise (and fall) of family fortunes.

I don’t shriek when I see a mouse. Well obviously. Yet I knew that health and safety were at issue. Is there Hunta Virus in Kern County? I knew I had to stop staring into its -oh, what the hell – his eyes. It was not clear who was hypnotizing whom.

“Mouse, mouse,” I cried.

Then as quiet fell, the mouse and I went back to gazing at each other.

My daughter eventually appeared, put her head in and looked down. My son-in-law followed in due course. The mouse sat staring at me.

We talked it over. I didn’t move. We decided to try the spider rescue trick: cover it with a bowl, slip cardboard underneath, carry it outside.

The mouse and I were motionless still. Son-in-law returned with pan and swooped down. Mouse made for the closet, slipping underneath the door. The closet floor is stuffed with laundry baskets, shoes, yoga stuff and more. I asked son-in-law to bang on the door and assumed my tiny friend had scarpered.

Half an hour later, as I returned from tooth brushing, he sallied across the room and back to the closet. Fifteen minutes after that, he re-emerged running toward me. He stopped eight inches away and stared into my eyes.

“You cannot be here,” I told him. He sat listening. “You have to go away, back out to your field.” He didn’t move.

My daughter, who had clearly just woken up, opened the door. The mouse retreated to the portable heater, where he sat in plain view, convinced we could no longer see him.

I gathered my quilt and my pillow and carried them to the living room where I cocooned myself on the suede sofa. I slept like a log and woke up stiff as one.

I was changed of course.

And so good morrow to our waking souls
That watch not one another out of fear (John Donne)

 

 

Winter Solstice

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Winter solstice occurs this year on Friday, December 21 at 11:12 UTC around 4:15 p.m. here on the west coast.

This poem was written nearly 20 years ago, when I was living in an apartment on Venice Beach. I brought a copy with me on this trip and it feels applicable now as we approach the longest night, a time when physical light has reached its lowest ebb and now will begin to grow again, a time when inner light is at the full and can be accessed.

images

Winter Solstice

Such deep dark
so long sustained
should smell of balsam,
cedar, pine,
should have a canopy of icy stars,
of Northern lights,
shifting panes of white or green.

-A child under a buffalo robe
watching a sleigh runner
cut through blue
moon-shadowed snow
sees a rabbit track running off
into deep woods.-

Waking in the depth
of this longest night,
thirsty for sleep,I hear
the pounding surf,
an angry wordless shout
one floor below
and the reverberating slam
of a dumpster lid.
The sky at least is quiet:
a star hangs
above the flight path.

In my long sleep,
I have been following
that track back
into the woods
breathing sprue pitch
and resined pine,
lashed by boughs of evergreen,
until I have arrived at this
secret place
which only wild things know,
a place to shelter
while things end,
time unwinds,
the circle turns.

When we awaken,
shouting, homeless,
single and bereft,
we will go forth
into the growing light,
a light
we creatures of the dark
must yet endure.

This is the place,
now is the time
for the birth of the Child
in the cave of the heart.

The First and Second Sleep

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In Medieval literature, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, there are references to the time between the first and second sleep, which was the ideal time for study, one book said. I vaguely remember knowing that already, possibly from a long ago summer course. I learned it anew from my morning paper, the National Post, which published excerpts of Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep this week.

The book’s author David K. Randall recounts how a Virginia Tech history professor noted these references in his reading and how a Bethesda psychiatrist put the question of what this meant to the test. He deprived those in his study of artificial light. Initially, they took the opportunity to sleep deeper and longer than they had before, but eventually, they seemed to catch up on their sleep deficit and a new pattern emerged. They fell asleep shortly after sunset and woke up sometime after midnight, at which time they stayed awake for an hour or so and then fell back into a second sleep. Having escaped the tyranny of artificial light, they had apparently reverted to the medieval sleep pattern.

Okay, I know I’m old, but this is ridiculous. I remember my grandfather sitting up in the middle of the night in his wooden chair with the wide arms. I had been woken up by the smell of the herbal cigarette he was smoking to soothe his farmer’s lungs.

When I was born, we had no electricity in our rural community. In fact electricity did not come to those hills until well after World War II. It was not until then that the people there got out from under the Depression and were able to afford to pay for the lines from the road to their farmhouses. And while I lived in town from the time I was 5, I spent summers back there with my grandparents, so I do recall a way of life that was mostly devoid of artificial light.

I say “mostly” because toward the end of those years, my grandmother managed to buy an Alladin lamp. Not the kind that you rub for three wishes, but a tall kerosene lamp with  a brighter light, which may have had something to do with the mantle. This particular lamp could also be hung on a wall bracket where it gave us kids enough light to see our playing cards half way across the kitchen. My grandmother sat nearer it to sew or knit and my grandfather sat in his grandpa chair at the gloomier end of the kitchen. The old, little oil lamp was still carried upstairs when we children went up to bed but the puddle of light it shed went back downstairs with Nanny.

I remember sitting on the porch in the evening watching the light fade in the east, my young aunt and uncles climbing onto the porch swing beside their father. The sun was going down behind the house, sinking below steep Hereford Hill. As the sky faded into an improbable turquoise in front of us, a single silver star gradually appeared over the Mount Monadnock. My grandfather broke the silence that had fallen on us five children.

“That will be Venus,” he said.

The evening star! And we children whispered to ourselves, “Star light, star bright/ the first star I see tonight/ I wish I may I wish I might/ Have the wish I wish tonight.” And then we refused to tell our wish for fear it would not come true.

I don’t remember what I wished, but it may well have been just to go on living in such blissful peace.

As darkness fell, a soft cloud of light bloomed softly from the town across the border in Vermont where there was electricity. Then one by one, the other stars popped out until the dome above us was full of them. We stood on the gravel drive gazing up at them, turning with our arms out for balance and nearly falling over, until Nanny called us in.

Once in a while, we found it necessary to journey to the outhouse before bed, a journey which could be undertaken only in pairs. There were no flashlights. It wasn’t worth lighting a lantern. I remember stepping down off the flat stone that served as a porch step and turning into a darkness as thick as black velvet.

“Stand still for a minute,” Nanny called before she shut the door against the bugs. “You’ll get your eyes back.”

I would have been glad just to get my breath back. Our voices seemed suddenly small. The darkness immeasurably large and strangely silent.

Were there wolves?

I have experienced such darkness as an adult at Peppermint Creek camp grounds above the Kern River in the Sierras. We always avoided the “serviced” camping area, pitching our tents next to the creek itself. Under the huge trees, there was no light pollution. The stars were numberless. It was possible to believe as I have heard that there are as many stars in the sky as there are grains of sand on all the beaches on earth.

Talking about the medieval two sleeps, a number of us have decided that we can take a new attitude to the tendency of age to wake up in the middle of the night. We can do what they did in the Middle Ages and value it as time well found.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/09/17/book-excerpt-how-the-lightbulb-transformed-the-

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/09/17/book-excerpt-how-litttle-we-know-about-sleep-is-sciences-dirty-little-secret/