Tired

This morning I am so tired. Tired in an eyes sore kind of way, in an ‘oh I could use a massage, poor shoulders’ kind of way. I stop halfway through doing something and find myself looking out the window thinking light things. I wonder if by not sleeping I am using up some reserve of restfulness, restedness which keeps me well. By not sleeping enough that is, I am getting sleep. Just not as many hours as I would like, as my body would like. Just not regularly, not a pattern of times to bed and time to rise. And this strange sense of pride when I manage to haul myself through some awful late night – early morning combo, as if this is a real achievement – to triumph over my own thoughtlessness towards my body.

The mountains are on my left as the train goes down the hill, I can gaze out over a misted valley, where my eye is somehow at horizon level, there is a ridge and valley filled with tress and in the very deep centre, mist. These trees are not just a certain number of ‘things’, lined up, or part of a system with a certain number of components – ‘how many? How many species? How many individuals? How many ecosystems?’ We ask, bean counters all. No, these trees and all that lives in and under and around them are peaceful. They are a repository of calm. Of self contained peacefulness. How do we overlook that in all our rushing around and bean counting? How do we forget to value their nobility? Their standing quietly with arms twisted and outstretched, the wonder of a bird sitting in the crook of one of these stable arms? What silent connectedness between a bird and a branch and the breeze as it lifts from sleep on the valley floor and stretches out touching gently all it passes? How is it we so easily forget this nobility? And there is something very balancing about having wonderous things around us that we did not make, construct, build, conjure up. They remind us that the world is more than us. That creativity emerges from life itself, not just our hands. This is like our conscience, demanding our humility and we ignore it in our arrogance.