sleep | Gladsome Lights

Many people need more sleep than usual during Bright Week, what we call the week after Pascha when the joy and lightness of The Resurrection of Christ are like a wave we want to ride as long as possible. Um…so why would we lie abed? Shouldn’t we be going forth in the power of the Resurrection accomplishing great things?

We are sleeping because we got v-e-r-y t-i-r-e-d during the marathon of services during Holy Week, then stayed up most of the night going into Sunday morning…and we couldn’t sleep a lot extra right away because we wanted to go to the picnic, and Bright Monday services… and because we were high on all that joy. (Also, it’s true, I personally have frequent sleep issues anyway.)

Bright Week has passed, but while it is yet Pascha — until Pentecost — some of us older than forty are still catching up. This poem reminds me a little of me — and some mornings my husband is right alongside, making a pair.

WEEKENDS, SLEEPING IN

No jump-starting the day,
no bare feet slapping the floor
to bath and breakfast.

Dozing instead
in the nest
like, I suppose,
a pair of gophers

underground
in fuzz and wood shavings.
One jostles the other
in closed-eye luxury.

We are at last
perhaps
what we are:
uncombed,
unclothed,
mortal.

Pulse
and breath
and dream.

–Marjorie Saiser

THE END OF SLEEP

The eyes are about to open.
Through fog, Sleep crosses the great water—
See how it sails in the little boat?
Slowly, such a long journey,
Bits of light
Catch colors in the mirrored hull.
Beneath the glassy surface, a glimpse
Of your dreams: the lake, the boat, with you
In it. Now a shadow
Falls over you: above the surface,
The figure of Sleep
Has leaned over its boat.
Hear Sleep’s feet plop in the shallows—
It pulls the boat to shore.

— Elizabeth Twiddy

This morning as I neared the shore of full consciousness, what I saw through the fog was myself, getting dressed and going to church for a Presanctified Liturgy. I was full of happy anticipation. Then I pulled the blinds open and was surprised to see, not the sunny and warm skies of the last few days, but thick and cold white fog.

I’ve read many people who say they love the fog, and I thought of them right away, wondering why I couldn’t be like them. Then I remembered the foggy days of my childhood when in the winter the damp cold would settle over California’s Central Valley like a perverse blanket. Not your normal blanket that makes you cozy, but something more like a conduit of chill. My fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Wicks, who came from South Dakota, said she was never so miserable in the dry winters of her youth as she was in our “temperate” weather that froze her to the bone.

The natural and normal tule fog that emerges from the ground after the first winter rains became a dangerous foe once I learned to drive and became aware of all the car crashes on the highways that are a frequent accompaniment to the season. I became familiar with the stiff neck you get peering intently through the wall of white trying not to run into something.

But this morning in March, all of that is far behind me, and for the Valley-dwellers it is likely passed as well by this time of year. So I thought I would look for a poem by one of those fog-lovers. The fog that’s outside my window is still a little too cold for my old bones to thoroughly enjoy, but I’m working on it. After all, it’s another part of our earthly home that is filled with the breath of God.

THE BREATHING

An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.