I love mornings, I like to get up sit in my favorite char sip my tea and watch the light shift from dark to light. I like to be up before the birds and listen for the first song. It’s always different. Sometimes the first chirp is heard and everyone joins in instantly, this morning I heard the first song and it was a good five minutes before the next, a crow joined in and slowly the chorus started coming alive. Do birds like to sleep in sometimes and other times they have an early agenda? This is what I like about the mornings there is time to dwell on such musings. Yesterday walking from the cabin to the studio, I was stopped by the sound of the bird wings as they darted across the yard from the pines to the kiwi vine, into the hardwoods and back, such skilled flyers, I was in total Ah, mesmerized by the force of life in flight. I just stood there spellbound, something profound in the simplicity of such a moment.
I am so grateful to wake up in the morning for the obvious reason that I am blessed to witness another moment of life and all the wondrous mysteries to unfold in another day. The other reason is waking means I was asleep. My health curse of the past five years has been insomnia. Oh God I asked, him / she / it, the devil and the angels for help pleading in the wee hours of the morning to please give at least a couple hours of some nocturnal death. What a journey, nights of hell, tossing and turning, flipping and yearning, screaming and crying, oh it was bad. Days of exhaustion after nights with out a single wink of sleep. I was getting rather whacked, memory was slipping, conversations just to difficult to maintain, an added level of danger to be a woodworker using machines devised secondarily for removing fingers, driving from California to Virginia spacing at seventy and the worst part, being so tired and the stress of fearing going to bed and facing another eight hours in hellsville of the mind. It was sucking me dry and I was scared for my sanity and everything I held dear. So like any health crisis it has taken a toll, I am in recovery not a hundred percent but thank God I wake up in the morning and I am so grateful for every hour of sleep, oh how I love, respect, honor and cherish my sleep.
It’s all in the mind this crazy restless never wanting to stop mind. Seeking to squeeze every morsel of every moment out of life, this ol mind of mine never seems to realize that enough really is plenty. So I try to slow it all down, the walks in the woods, being alone and my three saviors Art, Nature and Prayer really do work to help me in recognizing peace and at the end of the day to slip into slumber in a pleasant state of completion. Like every life mine is called upon to perform and show up out in the world of humanity. Oh what humanity is out there this week it was meetings and conversations with gallery owners, art reps, a developer of sustainable real estate, a reporter, several artists, a marketing agent, my men’s group, an art critic, a couple studio visits, two lunches and a dinner, a final and painful ending, correspondence, call to mom, my journal entries to dad on the other side, still dwelling on the sense that I was shot in the chest during the civil war (more on that in another blog) negotiating a public art project, comforting a dying friend, dinner with a best friend, and it go’s on. It’s all so good and so rich but jeez it just leaves me reeling in a swirl of human energy as each and everyone of those interactions need to get processed, filed, prioritized, evaluated, followed up with. I have these sculptures to create, chisels to sharpen, paintings to paint, shows coming up and woodworking projects to complete and the dang cabin to winterize. All in a week of a life, is this the way to be? Well in the center, in the core of it all, I do sense a calm and that calm takes this soul and walks it back out in the woods follows a deer trail, silence takes over the chatter of the mind and becomes the chatter of the birds the rustling leaves the snorts of deer and perhaps one day, this mind will be quiet and I’ll hear the sound of a mushroom snore.
Sweet Dreams
No comments:
Post a Comment