Revelations :: Part 1

The mystery and majesty of sleep when it comes easily — and when it doesn't.

This Saturday just gone, I couldn’t sleep. I also felt run down and like I was developing a really nasty cough. That’s a rarity for me. On both counts. To not be able to sleep or even really, to feel unwell. Exhausted, yes, often, but not ill.

One of the fondest stories my mother tells me about my first few years here is how well I slept from the very beginning. It’s always brought me an enormous amount of comfort - to know that even then I valued the preciousness of sleep as much as I do now, and to know that I must have felt very loved and safe to always sleep so soundly. It has, seemingly, set me up for life. That love, that safety, that comfort.

When I hear insomniac friends talk about their midnightly scramblings, I recognise my ability to drop off into that powder puff pillowed abyss as a bit of a superpower rather than the birthright that I feel it probably should be, though it is one of the things about myself that I most often take for granted because of how effortlessly it has always come to me.

It also means that when it doesn’t, I know that something is definitely up.

I’d gone to bed pretty early, nothing unusual about that — absolutely love a 9.30 lights-out, even more so on a weekend for the smug Sunday satisfaction of rising early, feeling thoroughly restored, off out for a stolen walk at the crack before any one else has dared even twitch a curtain.

I’d spent Saturday stomping around Hampstead Heath with a dear friend — full of fresh air, Daunt Books, delicious soup, crusty bread rolls, lashings of butter, more Daunt Books - to pick up some irresistible new print-work for the journey home. I felt that really good kind of dead-leg exhausted from tons of proper breathing space and world-to-rights chats, amidst long strong slow strides in mud-caked boots, stepping over tree roots as thick as tyres, older than a long passed great great grandparent.

I’d had a lot of ideas bouncing around during the past week though not quite been able to feel into which one had the most creative traction. I’d been carefully tracing my fingers along the edge of each of their strands to see if any wound back to form part of the same tapestry or if they belonged to different looms. There was a little residue of a case of the Marthas from last week, snagging at a few of them.

I’d been taking in an awful lot of stimulus over the weekend too: podcasts, movies, articles (sort of by accident but you know how sometimes a thing leads to a thing leads to another thing, particularly if you have access to the internet and an insatiable desire for knowledge) all of which I found hugely inspiring but each of which spun me off in completely different directions and resonated in some way with various things that I was already working on — I have a number of open drafts that I keep close to hand so my creativity can flow in whichever direction it pleases. It sounds messy but it works for me and usually that external inspiration brings clarity - what might look like three separate ideas on paper I can suddenly see as one and the narrative theme of whatever cultural highlight I’ve been absorbing that day is the missing loop that tethers them all together. Maybe that’s why I was allowing myself to stay curious and keep following those threads, in the hope of finding that clarity.