It is rare that I have sleepless nights. Unlike many friends and family, I am a ‘good’ sleeper. Some time ago I convinced myself that sleeping is a choice. This works for me though I know it does not for others and my heart goes out to you. I have heard the stories and seen the fallout from other’s sleepless nights. And to those who do battle with bedclothes, I say…peace…peace…peace.
Right now I am methodically making my way through favorite author Barbara Brown Taylor’s newest book Learning to Walk in the Dark. As always her words draw me in and create images that stick with me all day. I say I am reading it methodically, one chapter a day, because otherwise I would devour it like a cheap chocolate bar and it deserves more. Since the book follows the movements of the moon from waxing to waning stages, it also seems the right rhythm. The book celebrates the importance of darkness in our lives. How we need it. How it challenges us. How it nurtures us. Something we often forget or even deny.
It was the following set of sentences that grabbed me a couple of days ago and put me in the same camp as my insomniac frIends. Though I may sleep well, mostly, these words were truth writ large: “By day, I am a servant of the urgent. Nothing important has a chance with me. I am too consumed with the things that MUST be done to consider whether or not doing them even matters. But in the middle of the night I do not have so much to do. Once the lights are off and I am lying in my bed, the dark angel knows right where to find me. I am a captive audience.”
Recently I have started to wear one of the popular FitBit bracelets that monitors and records the activity and calories burned in my day. Another feature of this bracelet is that it also records sleeping patterns. Times awake. Times restless. In the morning I log onto my computer and get a colorful reading of the patterns of my nighttime life. A lovely blue is the backdrop and shows when I am actually sleeping. This is interrupted by an aqua line for times when I have tossed and turned. And then there are hot pink lines when I am awake. Seeing this allowed me to know that while I see myself as a good sleeper, the truth is that I have a more active sleep-awake life than I had known.
Reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s words and seeing the colorful painting my sleep patterns created, woke me up to the times in the night when I was indeed a ‘captive audience’. Each night there is no doubt a time when something that happened at the office that day replays itself and I see how my words could have been hurtful or graceless. At some point of the hot pink line on my sleep pattern, I am in mother-worry-mode, a place that has painted its color on my life story for more than two decades and one that will probably never be without color in my nighttime work. Still other spans of the night I am held captive by the things I forgot to do or those I must remember to do tomorrow….when I wake up….after I have gotten a good night’s sleep. Indeed the dark angel always finds me even if I am a ‘good sleeper’.
What to do with this nighttime activity? Wiser more well-trained and educated folks than I have tried to answer that question. For me, breathing helps. Being aware of the breath that carries me through some of my hurried days, slowing the rhythm, the in and out of animating spirit, takes me to the resting place that is one of the gifts of the dark and is one of the gifts of sleep.
And breathing is a form of prayer, isn’t it? Connecting with the Breath that breathed us all into being and rocks us into the sacred rhythm of the night, helping to take away the aqua and hot pink lines that pattern our bluest night and bring us into the rest that will fuel our days. In that place we will try with all our might to make meaning of all that fills the minutes and hours……and for that we need a good night’s sleep.
Sweet, peaceful, sleep to you……
