It is one of those days when my outside clock tells me that it’s been a long day and I need to sleep but my inside clock tells me that it’s time to write. I look around me and still see the movement of others in the house, and out on the street below and yet, inside – where I live – I am feeling pulled into that dense, timeless fog that is one of the gifts that comes from being awake at 3:00 a.m.
I love that time of day and I love that sense of being in a world far removed from the one my body occupies. Totally separate and alone and yet in some way connected to everything. Every breath feels like wispy tentacles of air reaching through the ether to connect. Every thought feels like it streams behind it and from it, at least a million more, none of which require detail or content but are full and rich and complete by virtue of their very existence.
Things flow, without the need for direction or intention, carried on an inner vibration that grows and expands and…what’s the word…emanates from my being. Like the sound a whisper makes when it’s heard. What we notice is the whisper… the sensation in the body that the whisper awakens…and forget all about the content. The sound of the whisper IS the content that is most meaningful!
I wonder why we think we need to know. The best nano-seconds of my life have unfolded with huge ramifications when I did not have a clue. I did not know; I did not seek to know; and knowing or not knowing never entered my awareness. The result was a rush of genius through the body – all without any particular content and yet racing with images and sounds and sensations in my body, capturing thousands of ideas in a single heartbeat – knowing deeply without having to know what I knew. I just knew.
In this moment, things are moving faster than my willingness or ability to attempt to capture them. In this moment, I wonder if my body knows that it is not yet 3:00 a.m. and is somehow holding back. What might that be, I wonder……
And so, I wait. I occupy my thoughts and my fingers by allowing what is there to fall out the ends of my fingers and make way for the ‘more’ that is close behind. I wander across the keyboard, restless and unable to settle, and yet clear in the recognition that what awaits has not yet completed gestation. When the moment presents, the next layer will birth itself. Nothing for me to do but wait….
It’s not what I do best. Waiting. There is a passive quality to it and yet, this waiting feels different. It’s not passive – it’s more like the deep inhale before the sigh is released. Can you have one without the other?
Breathing is good….
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