Sleepless Nights

I wasn’t sleeping too well in the week or so before June 23^rd, but since then, I’ve barely eked out three or four hours a night. It’s like somehow, the gaping chasm that has opened up under the feet of Britons has opened up in my own heart as well. I can acutely feel the pain and the chaos from here. What is so perplexing to me, as an unusually sensitive and “prescient” person, is that I didn’t really feel it coming when I was over in England two months ago. Each household received a rather slick mailing from the government outlining the reasons it recommended staying with the European Union, but the brochure might easily have been thrown out with many people’s recycling of store ads and other mass mailings. Generally speaking, there didn’t seem to be a sense of urgency or concern. People must have assumed there could never be a vote against the status quo, and somehow I (as a visitor) thought that this referendum was informational only, not binding. Whether it is a given that Britain will leave the European Union is still unclear. The potential ramifications and outcomes of this single day are almost mind-bendingly diverse. And in the middle of the night, I am perseverating about all of it.

Ultimately, I had no say last Thursday and probably ought to stay out of the world’s intensive chorus of commentary. Some of the spiritual lessons in all this are revealing, but analysis of this at such a traumatic moment, unbidden, could be quite unhelpful. My one effort to do that in an email to an English friend may have fallen quite flat, so no more of that. I do think, however, that it is entirely appropriate to speak to the tsunami that has washed over my own life. I mean, only a few weeks ago I finally managed to fully embrace my passion for choral evensong and English history, art, landscape, and literature, and to move beyond the family, practical, and other inner and outer considerations that have kept me for half a century from fully committing to what I love or being in my element. As some of you know from this blog, I’ve worked through a long process of accepting, “these are the things that interest me, and so many other things do not.” Now this. It’s huge. The way forward at least “felt” somewhat clear and joyful a week or so ago, but now, the fog has moved back in, as it has far more intensively for people across the Atlantic. I’m back to wishing, as I often have, that my life dream had been to run a bed and breakfast or go to law school, something with a more straightforward process.  And yet that would not have been me.

The only “energy” in the Universe is Love. On some level that we cannot understand, the world’s current volatility is bringing all of us to a higher experience of Love. It may not seem like it today, but if I can remind myself of that tonight, maybe I’ll move up the scale from four to five hours of sleep. I need it. I’m exhausted. And I’m probably getting far more sleep than my British friends!