Before Sleep

Art by Rebecca J. Hartman

“…letting it loose like a kite on a broken string…”—Truman Capote

Things fall away. We lose desires and memories, time passes, and much less seems to matter. Still, at night, worries surface and climb, like kites on a string. How to snip them loose?

It seems essential to recall what grounds us, what we have always loved, who we have always been, the few things that remain without question. In the quiet we can collect again—that is, re-collect—the consistent threads: gardenias beneath a childhood window; gardens admired on elegant streets in the South; the first corsage for a junior high school dance. Always there has been a little skip of the heart for flowers, for nature.

And the people we still love? We have always loved them, from the first time we knew them, and if we had only a dozen to gather around us, we could list them with no trouble. These remain.

Last night I walked through every room of the house, surveying shelves for beloved books. I was thinking of a post by a Florida friend, quoting Erasmus: “Before you go to sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.” I gathered ten old friends, hardbacks and paperbacks, and tried some of them again, one at a time.

The books. There have always been the books, the words, the ideas, the search for comfort, beauty, and the sacred. I do not have to hold these too tightly. Some things we do not lose, at least while in a reasonable state of mind.

All that we have loved, cared for, and gathered into ourselves becomes a part of us, whether in a reasonable state of mind or not. I imagine this energy, these loves, this illumination going with us wherever we go on earth. I like to imagine, too, that it rises like “hearts…hurrying toward heaven” (Capote).

If we can hold even a piece of this insight authentically as our own—that some things are of the “essence,” and the passing or superficial can be snipped away—then I think we can rest and reclaim what we think we have lost.

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Fill in the Blank Verse (Evening Note #3)

Beyond the glass, against the upper pane
     backlit leafless limbs
     of hawthorn twigs 
     tangle, twist in wind, far from the roots
     that reach down, grounded in a deeper source.
 
I turn to ease the ache of lying still;
the dog turns too,
and she reclaims her spot
against the tender bend
                                  behind my knees.
 
Give me understanding,
a request
as snowplows pace the pavement of the street,
grinding teeth on asphalt, chomping ice.
 Show me the way to fill in all the blanks
of people and the places I have been.

Briefly I sleep and dream of scented warmth;
camellias drop and I’m a child again
   A slant of light (a serving, sliver, slice)
  illuminates the upper window glass...