Insomniatic Mumblings

It's quarter after five in the morning. My lids are heavy and my body feels the heaviness of exhaustion, but I haven't been able to sleep. I need to get up and start my day in the next couple of hours and I fear I've reached that crucial crossover where falling asleep now would be disastrous. No, I must just push through.

It's raining this predawn Thursday morning. I can hear it through the bedroom window—the sound of the water in the spout from the gutters, a sound I've grown accustomed to in my years in this apartment. The sound of it at this early hour, something to which I've also grown accustomed.

My earliest recollections of true insomnia are from this room, latenights my undergrad thesis year, my first year at the museum, work stress and excitement keeping me up, then following years up far too late talking or thinking. I remember tiptoeing out of the bedroom to sit on the patio some middle-of-the-night a few years ago, staring out at the street, the swaying shadows of trees under streetlights, the occasional sound of a passing car, the windchimes; feeling the whole of the world spread out beneath me, the root of myself settle into something; feeling, in that quiet moment of the darkest hour of night, a sort of peace, a sort of gratitude and grace, a deep settledness within myself.

I've been thinking a lot about that root of myself, about the gratitude I feel for being allowed to nurture it...

I've just deleted 6 or 7 paragraphs here, paragraphs describing all the thoughts that have been keeping me up, but I'm not sure I'm capable of being eloquent about it yet. It all came out as a rambling jumble. It is important to me. I'd like to say it all better than I can now. I'd like to find the words.

Suffice it to say for now, it has something to do with that anchor, something to do with what Unitarians list as one of their (ok, maybe our?) basic tenets: the inherent dignity and worth of every person. It has something to do with violence, something to do with empathy, and something to do with our rights to be nurtured as our selves, nurtured and loved as our own individual, flawed, confused, struggling, striving, radiant selves.