Night Journeys

I wake in the night and wait for the moment when thoughts turn into dreams. It’s a shimmering bridge of a moment, a brief transitional state, especially elusive if you are consciously seeking it, and when it comes, by definition you missed it, because if it came, it means you were blessed with sleep. But I lie awake waiting, trying to coax it, bemused by the random procession of images from all across my life, still imagining different endings to actions I regret, and worrying about problems for which I can do nothing. I am sure that there are many others with me in this sleepless state. (Does anyone lie awake with joy?)

How crowded a life is, how teeming with experience! I think I could spend eternity contemplating moments. Whether it meant anything, well, that’s a different matter. I suppose when it comes to meaning, we must be the authors. But why do I so vividly recall pedaling my bicycle through the streets of Madison, Wisconsin late at night, moving briskly to ward off the chill, past shut-down shops and sleepy windows, through the pool of a streetlamp’s glow, pausing with my foot down at a crossing light blinking yellow, a young girl alone, destination tentative. Why am I suddenly seeing myself with my childhood buddy Carol climbing down her fire escape to play with dolls on the rooftop above Blitstein’s lumberyard on Coney Island Avenue? (Mr. Blitstein yelled at me once for putting dirt in a little alcove near his doorway, because he didn’t understand it was a flower I had planted, a beautification gesture, and I didn’t understand that flowers needed their roots.) And why do I remember my oldest brother reading to me from a book with a red cover and a black silhouette drawing of cowboys, or the way Chicago smelled like cherries on the day I first arrived there, or a little boy named Christian from Guatemala, in my very first class as a student teacher, telling me that his grandfather taught him to make paper boats and set them sailing, and now his memory is also mine, and I wonder what in the world became of that dear little boy. This parade could go on for hours.

So of course I cannot sleep. It’s the great headwater of my head with its million tributaries, and each tributary has tributaries, and there’s a vast sea somewhere, but it’s out of sight. I don’t mind it that much. It can be entertaining, in a self-absorbed way. Worse is fretting about the six hundred dollars I lost by being impatient last week, jumping the gun, as it were, and not waiting for the airline to cancel the flight. And so I own a credit now in the form of a ticket that must be used within a time frame during which I have no interest in traveling, nor would it be wise, to a choice of cities I have no desire to visit. Worse than even that, though, is trying to estimate when we might be able to travel to England to see our daughter, or wondering how differently our elder years are going to unfold in the aftermath of the apocalypse. Or thinking even bigger, obsessing about climate change, and the wanton undermining of our democracy and whatever positive steps we had taken toward a more just and sane vision of our country, and the current war against science being waged by the ignorant.

The days are strange. Tragedies loom but silliness blooms. A roadrunner has taken to strutting around on the deck, and the hills are yellow, and the frogs are noisy. I have rediscovered a fondness for milk chocolate and for reading Jane Eyre and for taking long hot baths with The New Yorker, even while its pages get rippled and plump and leave ink stains on my fingers. I tried to sew a face mask and failed abysmally. I blame my seventh grade Home Economics teacher, who made sewing a fearful chore rather than a creative endeavor, but I suppose many creative endeavors must necessarily start out as fearful chores, and the fault is probably mine for not sticking with it. Yeah, come to think of it, I did the same thing with knitting. But I like to plant things, and I like to cook, so I am not without my domestic skills.

In any case, I don’t really know how the days are passing, but somehow they go by, and then at a certain hour it seems like time to fluff the pillows and open the window wide and climb into bed. It’s reassuring to have Monte there, and sometimes I fall asleep promptly, but then there are those wakeful times, especially lately.

William Stafford called it the cave of night. And even in the darkness, he said, you open your eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast and as far as your thought can run. Yes, as fast and as far as thought can run, and that’s fast and far indeed, and we become a secret storehouse, so open and foolish and empty.

How infinitely wide is the mind! William Stafford always understood. But he knew too that we could steer away and into better currents.

Here’s how he concludes his poem Waking At 3 AM:

“A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right. And you sleep. ”

That bridge to sleep does come eventually, and the cryptic and exhilarating journeys through new dreams.

And then, before long, I can feel the daylight brightening my face, and it always takes me by surprise. But I keep my eyes closed for a while, lingering in that lazy limbo, when dreams mix with morning and anything might still happen…you have only to make a move…but wait.