computer

Goodness but this humidity is something else! That, and the Cosmic Shenanigans, the Seven Sisters lining up a gazillion miles above our heads, the Moon playing Quidditch with them. Big Game in the sky. And, that’s enough capitals for now. Moving beyond……

I feel as if I am carrying said sky on my head, the biggest cloud-hat ever, but it doesn’t stop there, with just me. I see faces sweat lined, a stoop in shoulders, a trudge in steps, an Aah in voices. It thinks me. We on this westerly island are more used to slam and crash and wheelies taking off into another’s garden; or sun straight and clear, air fresh with clarity, helping our minds to scurry like mice, busy, productive, enterprising, aware. These few days of cosmic hoo-ha and all those sisters doing their aligning thing as if they plan to dance the merengue which will probably result in a load of noise we cannot hear, but can feel, has been daunting. Add mother moon and, well, I can’t go there. I just feel tired and here’s where inner talk makes an entrance.

If I say, out loud, that I am tired, it isn’t just the other person who hears my words, and, because I have spoken it out, he or she now needs to respond, hence commencing a conversation about the whys and whats and hows and whatnots of my particular type of tiredness. My computer brain has heard my voice and has recognised it as familiar. Good lord, I have started something, no, two somethings, neither one of which I want. Apart from a complete waste of precious time with a friend who now has the tired word blanching the storyline balance of his or her own life into a softness which is not quite edible, my own computer is going bajonkers on a ‘fix’ and coming up with endless plasters to stick over the ‘wound’, one I have just announced as a problem. All completely useless, what my friend says and the plaster. So, my question is, why do I speak it out, even to myself?

I know why I am tired. I work 4 days a week in the Best Cafe Ever (sorry, caps will come in) and I am not young anymore. I love it, you know that. but the number of days takes a toll. I remember Old Katy in Tapselteerie days telling me her bones were sore. I was decades her junior, made kindly adaptions to her work load, but didn’t understand it at all. I do now. Next thing on the tiredness thing. Over a few nights, all my smoke alarms have erupted into song. You knew about the first, I think. I binned that one, but the others shriek, and it is a shriek, picking the deathwatch (sailor’s term) hours to make a point, one which still confuses me. There is no fire, no gas escape, nothing. I ping out the batteries and try again to sleep. The batteries, just fyi, are new. I think this is all to do with cosmic hooha.

Back to inner talk. I believe that we are all hard on ourselves, no matter our history, and I say that because we blame too quickly, thus allowing ourselves a wee freedom. I have learned, am still learning, to take responsibility for the moment, for everything, actually, each step, every choice, regardless of bloodline or memories, or of what lies in our paths. Inner talk plays a huge role in this dance, this delusion, this rise or this descent. So, when I say to myself ‘I am tired,’ this brain of mine, devoid of emotive action, merely a mathematical robot, agrees. I stoop, I trudge, I tell someone, poor little me.

Well blow that right out of the water. I saw a young otter today on the Tapselteerie track; I went to church and found perspective; I watched a Peacock Butterfly on a flower, knelt down to see the sun through the backside of a Himalayan Poppy, lifted a Carder bee out of the sunroom, smiled with friends, drove past healthy black sheep, watched a toad pull itself through the green and saw the smallest moth perk atop my laptop.

Looking only at the beauty of whatever life anyone lives in, is not a plaster. It’s a re-jig of inner thinks. Every time.

We rarely draw the curtains against the night. Even in the winter, when the dark creeps out from the woods so much earlier to dim our eyes and send us running for the long life light bulb switch – even then I hesitate to make that final call, so entrancing is the ‘out there’.

Out there a massive power shift is already playing out. The creatures of the night are waking, alert and ready. Their eyes are not ‘accustomed’ to the dark, they are made for it right from the very beginning; it is their light. The rest of us whose vision is, at best, impaired in darkness, must draw in, draw our curtains, hide from danger, sleep. There is a strong pull of the wild in me as dark descends, a longing to be a part of it, and without a torch. Turning back from the window, having reluctantly closed off the night, I face warmth and safety, some polite crime on television, or a read beside the fire, supper, and I wonder what I’m missing.

Rabbits know fine what they’re missing, ditto hens and rodents. Although the latter do pop out at night, they must needs scurry beneath the dense shelter of undergrowth for the screech owl is about. Even scurryings won’t save them from the neighbouring cats. So, it isn’t darkness we, or they are afraid of, but the creatures who inhabit it. In our case, imagined ones too, demons and lurkers and no-gooders with an eye for weakness. And we are weak in darkness, compromised and slow to focus.

And so, we turn in, pushing the darkness back into the woods and back across the sea, flooding our night with light, and more light, neon and flashing, computer screens, television, digital clocks, standby lights on printers, sound systems, streetlights lighting our hurried steps until we find our own doorway, unlock it and step into our nests, leaving the stars behind. We cook, argue about homework, phone mother, answer emails, bathe and sleep until the light begins to rise again, a slow green at first, then lifting white or blue or pinkly clouded into the full light of day. But maybe we miss something. Maybe that’s what I feel so strongly. The way we divide our days and nights into themselves, stored neatly, controllable, separate, and, yet, they are one.

To stand out inside the darkness, to feel it’s soft mantle about our shoulders, and to stand long enough to see is a wonder. Even without visible stars, even on the blackest of nights, there is still light. We make it. It emanates from our ancient human spirit, this light, and all I have to do is wait until I am fully present. Dashing out with the recycling is not the same. I need to stand, to let the inside worries slip away, to move, without moving, into the wholeness of the dark, to let it become one with me. I become aware of movement, of sounds, of the depth and texture of the dark. My ears hear, my eyes see, my mind empties of everything that lies behind the front door. It is, as if it is another world, one of bustle and of chaos and the quack of televised nonsense, of clatter and youtube, of the ping of an arriving email, of the whirr of a fridge, the hum of a computer, the ticking of a clock. There is no time out here, no hum, no white noise, only the immediate and raw darkness, broken by the rustle of mouse deep in the dry stone wall, a triumphant hoot, a warning cry, the rush of spring water over rocks, the wind through the pines.

No currency exchanges hands out here; no bartering or negotiating required. No clothing, fashion, menus or public transport. No strife over friendships or loyalties, no business sense, no degrees, no difficult mother in laws.

I stand for a while, a part of the darkness. I feel vulnerable and alone and I thrill to those feelings, for this is real life, real dark, real and raw and sharp and edgy. This is Order.

Then I turn back to what the world calls order, with a twinkle in my eye.