The Contingency Plan

In a typically extreme way, I've been pushing myself lately to keep going. Rest has been a challenge. It's 2.44am and I can't sleep.

This happens 2-3 times a year. I'll stay up until around 4am, wired for no good reason, emotional, at times sobbing and in the stillness waiting for sleep to seduce me.

These events never really coincide with a major event or outburst and yet they leave me feeling quite clear. It's like the darkness prevents me from focussing on anything but how I've been and I purge myself of this heaviness.

Sounds very therapeutic. Though I'm sure it's uncomfortable, too, when all you want to do is sleep... I hope you are feeling lighter and clearer. Sending you warm, sleepy thoughts...!

still, silent, quiet, restfull, open and nothing, lots of nothing wrapping you up and holding you tight, nothing to gain, nothing to loose, touching you inside, like no one could.


Here is a moment from the book - a poem by Ted Hughes. English fields in the crisp morning is something to feel. One day, one day.....

I climbed through the woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness.

Not a leaf, not a bird -
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood.

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline - blackening dregs of the brightening grey -
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey - ten altogether -
Megalith still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging -.
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over the valleys, in the red levelling rays -

In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

Wow, don't you feel exhausted the next day?

That is why it is a better read than a do.

Funnily enough I didn't feel exhausted the next day. This pattern continued throughout the week, until at the end I slept, peacefully and tired.