December 22, 2005

• wanted: wintersleep

  
  Hibernation
  
  Gone Haywire?

  
  I’m not sleeping much.  I noticed when I was going through last
  year’s entries for the Countdown to Christmas that I wasn’t sleeping
  much then, either.  That’s the prime value of a journal, after
  all:  to refresh the memory.  Otherwise, there’s precious
  little use in writing down the little details of daily life.

   Then I remembered that as a child I tended to sleep little around this time of
  year.  My mother always attributed it to the excitement of
  “waiting for Santa.”  Never mind that I hadn’t believed in Santa
  since I was a preschooler and there were few surprises in the packages
  under the tree.  “Any explanation is better than none,” was my
  mother’s style, unlike my father who would get out a dictionary or
  encyclopedia or head for the library when confronted with inexplicable
  facts.

   I recalled, too, that every summer
  solstice Doug and I both do at least one all-nighter.  It makes
  more sense then when there is no night, in the sense of a dark period
  of time.  I habitually chalk it up to my being accustomed to going
  down when the sun does, but that explanation makes no sense for
  Doug.  He goes to sleep whenever the urge strikes him — whenever
  and wherever.  It’s one of the little quirks about him that
  probably wouldn’t be so endearing to anyone but his mother.

  
  Doug’s sleep pattern is as disrupted  right now as my own is,
  too.  In our mutually sleep-deprived state, we have been spending
  an inordinate amount of time discussing who got up when, how long one
  or the other has been up, etc.  “Was I up already when you got
  up?”  “Have I been sleeping very long?”  “7:23??  Is
  that AM or PM?”

  I had been up about twenty-two hours when Greyfox called today to tell
  me that he had cancelled his trip up the valley for a dental
  appointment, due to icy roads.  An hour or two before that, I’d
  gotten a little sleepy, but decided it would be less painful to stay
  awake than to be awakened when he arrived.  Soon after talking to
  him, I ate a snack, had a glass of goat milk, and went to bed.  I
  think I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  Half an hour later, the phone rang.  I stumbled across the room to
  answer the one here by the computer, the cordless phone by my bed
  having gone wonky recently.  Greyfox had a question about a
  windshield chip, which I couldn’t answer as much because I was
  half-asleep as for reasons of general ignorance.

  Back in bed, I lay there wakeful for two hours before giving up and
  getting up.  That was four hours or so ago.  I think I have
  mentioned that I have an uncertain and rather loose relationship with time as this
  culture understands it.  Greyfox, the enrolled member of the
  Muscogee Nation of Florida, certified redskin and certifiable lunatic
  shaman, kids me about running on Indian Time.

  I am neither thrilled nor dismayed at the flexibility of time as I
  perceive it, and my general aversion to tic-toc reality.  I am
  pleased beyond my capacity to articulate it to have the liberty to
  indulge it.  Simultaneously as I marvel at the chaotic nature of
  Doug’s and my bodies’ responses to the change of seasons, I thank the
  Universe and its controllers, including Greyfox, that no more often
  than about once or twice a month do I have to make and keep an
  appointment.
   
  Here at 62 degrees north latitude, today was seven seconds longer than
  yesterday.  That interval will grow incrementally longer each day
  until June, when the daylength will increase by more than six minutes
  daily.  Where you live, are the daylength and its rate of increase
  a routine part of weather reports on radio and TV?  Here, they
  are.  I don’t recall having heard such things in other places
  where I have lived.  Alaskans, however, are intensely interested
  in those little facts.  After the summer solstice, though, they
  tend not to mention it.  Nobody really wants to know how much
  daylight we’re losing during the long and too-quick slide into winter.
  
  On this day last year I focused on the religio-spiritual meaning of the earthly incarnation of the Christos, addressing, among other things (including Vermont Royster’s famous Christmas column), the question:

  Why?
  
  
  Why?
  
  
  Why?

  

  
  

  
  
  

  • 11:02 pm
  • 2 Comments