The shifting nightscape of my insomnia

I sometimes have insomnia, the kind where you find yourself wide awake at 2 am, mind racing.

The river of thoughts that rushes through me at these hours used to be frightening. I would torture myself with a full spectrum of what-ifs, which spun my nerves more tightly with each round, until it was all I could do to lie flat on the mattress. During the first years of our marriage, my poor husband would sigh as I slid out of bed and fled toward the study. There, I would turn on a light and read or write, and wait for a feeling of "normal" to pull me back into my life.

This habit of getting up and doing something became an easy habit for me, and one that only made my insomnia worse. If I could grab a last hour or two of sleep before I showered for work, I felt like I had "slept." To my surprise, I managed; in fact, I thrived during the day. The light itself was a tonic, a revelation that everything was okay. And in the middle of the daylight I marveled at how clean and safe everything seemed. It felt impossible that the shadowy loneliness of my wee hours could coexist with the happy days I experienced. I look back at that time, and I know that I must have propelled myself through the world on sheer nervous energy.

The funny thing is, I never dreaded going to sleep. I loved our room, our home, our cozy life. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, and my dreams were mostly rich and sweet. It was the slow, dark hours I hated, while I worried myself into a frenzy, my mind buzzing at the low frequency of the traffic on the interstate outside our loft.

In college, years before I had my own sleepless nights, I shared a dorm room with a girl who had chronic insomnia. She was the first person I'd ever met who talked about it and accepted it as a part of her life. When I woke to use the bathroom at the end of the hall, the half-light from our window revealed Lisa in the bed across the room, her eyes wide open and fixed on some spot on the ceiling. Almost always, she would roll over on her bed to greet me in strangely chipper yet sotto voice, "Hi Kirie!" Amazingly, sometimes she would start to engage me in conversation, as though I had just returned to the room after a class.

Lisa was probably only 20 years old, but she was as sensible as a real grownup. She never complained, but instead just took her insomnia on her own terms. Her solution: the radio on her Walkman. During those post-midnight hours, she tuned her radio to AM talk radio hosts, and they lulled her off to sleep just before light each day.

Knowing what I know now, I probably would have made a point to waken just to talk to her. The hardest part of my own insomnia was the loneliness. The otherworldly feeling of the wee hours comes not from the darkness so much as the absence of other people. No wonder Lisa welcomed my waking so eagerly. How I would have loved to wake my husband to talk with me on those interminable nights in the loft!

My insomnia pursued me through several moves, the arrival of our oldest daughter, and some practice with meditation. But, by some stroke of grace, once I got into my mid-thirties, the river of thoughts started bringing fewer and fewer anxieties with it as it coursed through my 2am bedroom. The darkness started feeling less oppressive, the dusky forms of our dresser or the curtains less threatening.

I stopped retreating to a lighted room, and resolved to instead feel the night settle around me each time I woke at odd hours. And on many of those nights, something resembling a calm came to me. Sometimes, I would even find that I could get myself back to sleep. By some small miracle, more and more of my nights were spent sleeping. Insomnia has now become only a sometime companion for me, and for that I am grateful.

When the formula in my life is right, the river of thoughts resumes its path through my night room. But bobbing along with it now are ideas, plans, things to puzzle through. When I wake up at 2 am these days, I am not buzzing with what-ifs. I am dreaming of projects, I am mind-writing, I am hearing music in my head. A few weeks ago I even caught myself practicing the fingerings for a song I'm learning on the piano. It is still otherworldly at night, but now the world feels charged with possibility instead of dread.

When I was younger, waking to the knowledge that I was the only one conscious left me gasping. And far from comforting, my husband's rhythmic breathing made me only all the more aware of how far away he was when sleeping, as though he had receded from me and into his dreams. My panic was practically tangible, like a whispered, frantic mantra of "I'm alone! I'm alone! I'm alone!"

Something has shifted since then, certainly. And perhaps it's because I'm distracted by my burgeoning list of projects, but I no longer feel so lonely when I'm up with my thoughts. Or perhaps I feel more secure in my marriage; fifteen years with my soulmate has taught me something more about trust, and I no longer feel he has fled from me in his sleep. The house itself offers its companionship. Far from frightening, the house at night envelops me, welcomes me, and nurtures some excellent ideas for all the things I enjoy making.

There is still the silence, but it is laced with the sounds from the woods outside our window, the foghorn on the bay, the thrum of the cats as the sleep on the bed. When I do want for a facsimile of human interaction, I find I crave voices. Last year, I realized I could, like my old college roommate, listen to stories through headphones, and I started using my ipod during my night wakings.

Hearing the whisper of a storyteller is intoxicating. I've found that with these voices in my ears, I'm soothed to sleep, but at the same time, inspired by the stories themselves. I've been discovering an unexpected energy in the spoken word, an energy that carries over into my perceptions of the next day. And, most surprising, I have actually started relishing my sleepless hours as quiet opportunities to just listen and dream my waking dreams.

Repost: The sky was blue on September 12th, too...

Like so many other people this week, I found myself lost in thoughts of eight years ago, remembering. Indulge me as I take a detour from the tone of my normal postings, and reflect on where I was this week in 2001...

Do you remember how blue the sky was? All along the east coast, it was a stunningly clear day, bright and clean, and a welcome reprieve from the summer. A perfect fall day. Normal, everyday, happy. Until. Until the phone call from my husband that sent me to the television, and we saw the second plane hit.

You know the story from there. We all do. The phone lines were jammed; the news, stammered by reporters as stunned as we were, became an instant addiction. The world tilted for me as the pentagon was hit, then as the impossible happened--the towers fell. I was convinced then that more terrible things really could happen, and would keep happening. Anxiety, not a stranger to me on any day, was overwhelming that afternoon. The day was wrongly beautiful. The sky, eerily silent and empty of any planes, was sharp with blue and cloudless, yet the birds and crickets continued to sing, the sun continued blithely across the sky.

Lines from Auden's poem, Funeral Blues, kept popping into my mind:

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The sky was perfectly clear on September 12th, too. And I was, admittedly, at a safe remove. I was near Washington DC at the time, but not in it. But "safe" was something I wouldn't feel for a long time. The low drone of fighter jets crossing the sky all night woke me for weeks, and comfort eluded me for much longer.

2974 people died in those attacks that day, and our world did indeed tilt off its comfortable axis. Peace to their souls and their families...

Because I am learning to focus

I'm learning to focus on what I like to do, and (at least in terms of art/craft), I am going to start delegating the things I don't truly enjoy.

With some shame, I admit it: I don't really enjoy quilting. Well, to be more exact: it's the the quilting part of making a quilt that I don't like: you know, the part where you stitch the top, batting, and back, together. I love the feel of a finely quilted quilt, and I know lots of talented quilters, but I don't enjoy it enough to put in the time to do it well. There. I said it.

I do love making the quilt top. I seem to always come up with a plan for a quilt design, and I have many quilt tops in the works, but doing the actual quilting has been such a task that I've postponed finishing the pieces I've started.

This summer, in the middle of my frenzied organizing/cleaning/refreshing/repainting, I discovered a beautiful quilt I'd made for Ada with the many of the same fabrics from her baby quilt. Above is a photo of the baby quilt, which I did for her while I was waiting for her as a baby. During that waiting time, I had so much frenetic energy that I made dozens of projects for her room, including the twin-sized quilt I found in the armoire this summer. As I examined it again, I realize had made a good start on it, with putting the layers together, and beginning the quilting, but there was a lot of work left on it.

Ada found me with the newly-found and unfinished quilt, and looked at it with such longing. I wanted to finish it for her, but frankly, the idea of cramming it into my machine to try to quilt it left me feeling overwhelmed. Suddenly it came to me: There are people who do this sort of quilting professionally. What if I found someone to do this for me? And guess what?

Ada's quilt was finished by a lovely lady with a longarm machine and a talent for fixing my assembly boo-boos. Ada and I are both really pleased with it. Ada and I worked with Sharon to pick a design for the edges--Ada chose butterflies--and wow!

Now I'm ready to move on to piecing Esme's baby quilt, which has been on hold for, oh, about three years. My new friend Ms. Sharon will be doing the quilting part, and suddenly I feel the inspired energy to pick up that project right away. I think knowing I don't have to spin my wheels with the quilting has made me feel more free to enjoy the process of sewing the patchwork.

What's funny is that feeling okay with delegating is a huge deal for me. I'm a do-it-yourself kind of girl, and delegating runs counter to that. Or maybe not. Because--especially with artwork--if I can peel off a few things that I don't love or that take more time than reasonable--then I will have more time to do things with my husband and girls, and more time to make things and do things that really make my heart sing. With that in mind, I am going to embrace a little delegation so I can really enjoy the work in my hands as much as possible.

Message from a Cornet Case

In some of my favorite types of fantasy stories, a person is able to bend the constraints of time and space and communicate to their future or past self. I find this notion endlessly fascinating—what would I say to the Kirie of 20 years ago? What would she have to tell me? Would she look at the 40-year-old Kirie with skepticism, or admiration, or worse—shame? Just imagining the possibility to encounter my future or past self sets me aflutter with excitement. I hope that’s something I have in common with the Kirie of 1989. Enthusiasm seems to be a common thread in all the times of my life, and it’s my aim to buoy that feeling forever.

Over the past few months, I’ve revisited an old enthusiasm of mine—a love of music. As things happen, we recently got a piano, and both Ada and I immediately started lessons. Ah, wonderful thing, that piano! Ada and I literally debate about who will get the next turn to play, and by my best guess, is that at minimum, we are playing an hour a day, every day. Ada is playing with equal parts precision and passion, and it is a pleasure to listen to her play. Esme has given the music a try, too, but she is still a little small to play the keys. Her contribution is mostly singing with gusto, and dancing with abandon to our songs.

I have never formally played piano before, but I have been an avid admirer of those who can. When I was a teenager, I loved to sing and to act and (try) to dance, and I was often around amazingly talented peers who could do all three with skills beyond their years. One girl in particular was especially gifted not only with a hauntingly lovely voice, but an innate sense of music that allowed her to play and compose rich, beautiful songs that seemed to come from some special place that only she could access. Vickie was so talented that when she would perform or practice, I literally felt chills run down my back. I was in awe of her then, and it pleases me no end to think that she still is composing and singing today.

When I started lessons on the piano, some element of myself felt as though I had stepped back in time, to that space when self-made music was such a part of me. How much I had wished I could play piano so that a real song would come forth, something I could sing to, and carry in my head all day. As soon as I started working with our piano teacher, Ellen, I had the sense that that long-closed door had opened wide for me again.

Ellen understood immediately why I was looking to learn piano. Certainly, my interest has nothing to do with performing recitals or padding a resume or impressing anyone. Rather, it’s that I want to find another way to let some beauty into my life. Music is its own language, and while it’s been awhile since I’ve used it, I’ve been longing to return to it for years.

Ellen’s teaching approach has been to work with me to learn the basics of piano, but also to let me push ahead, to play with composing and improvisation and things a beginning student normally wouldn’t do. It is thrilling! At night I am dreaming of music, and in the day, my fingers are playing the notes on imaginary keyboards, somewhat obsessively. And it is such a pleasure. I’ve been working out very simplified versions of songs I love to sing, and I found out that I can play a few songs from basic beginning songbooks. It is so fun to sing and play with the girls—and this after only a month of lessons!

Ada, too, is learning the basics, as I said, with precision. But Ellen also has her feeling the passion that goes with writing music on her own. With Ellen’s help, Ada has written—with notes and time signatures!—small songs about flowers, and butterflies, and our cat. And in the process, Ada’s learning is progressing exponentially. She’s not only reading the words, playing the song, the rhythm, and singing—she is able to read the notes as well. I was bursting with pride when, after her third lesson, she was able to effortlessly identify each note on the treble clef scale by name. She is a quick study, and she is falling in love with the music, too. I couldn’t be more pleased.

And, as things so often do, the music has multiplied. We’ve been playing rhythm instruments like wood blocks, maracas, the triangle. And I’ve pulled out my old cornet, a two-toned beauty that I played for six years when I was a young girl. I surprised myself, when I could immediately play songs for the girls, and I was able to teach them how to “buzz” on the mouthpiece and get some nice blares out of the instrument. Imagine the sound of an elephant’s cry, and you’ve heard Esme’s playing. Not bad for a two year old.

It was with the cornet that the message arrived. On Sunday, as I opened my battered cornet case, I found the most amazing communiqué from my past self. On a 4 x 6 note card, scrawled in green ink, was a to-do-list that was so typical of me that it might have been written last week. But the date on the top of the card was Thursday, August 7, 1992.

In August 1992, I was on the very brink of a life change, but I didn’t know it. Those days full of routines marched me closer to a series of important days arriving only months later: The day when I would leave an abusive relationship, the day I would meet the man I would marry, the day I would graduate from college. And all those days flowed toward lovely today…but what was I to know of that future as I contemplated what needed doing on Thursday, the 7^th of August, 1992?

On Sunday, August 23, 2009, I sat on the floor of my studio with my open cornet case and I mused about the oddities on the old list: 5 loads of laundry? And this before being married with children. And tanning? What was I trying to do to myself? Nylons?

Mostly I wondered why this list was there, nestled carefully in with the mouthpiece. I flipped the card over, and some childlike attempts at musical notation answered my question. It was a song—I had been writing down the notes of a song, clearly something I could play on my b-flat cornet.

So I picked up the cornet, and played with some surprising ease the song I’d tried to capture in late 1992. And as I did so, a bouncy, 22-year-old Kirie materialized along with the ending verse of Chet Baker’s “How Deep Is the Ocean.” --The verse? "And if I ever lost you/how much would I cry? How deep is the ocean/How high is the sky?"

Yes, that fits. Message received. I think about that Kirie who comes back to me with those ringing notes, and I smile to think about how intense I was! How dreamy! I loved that song then, and hearing it fresh from the bell of my horn, I love it still. And that younger Kirie, as clear as the ringing notes, tells me to play the music, to hold onto that childish dreaminess. If I could send a message back to her, it would be: Thank you for visiting me! Please know that I hear you, and thank goodness I remain as enthusiastic, dreamy, and intense as ever. Thanks for the memo, sweet girl. Hang in there—your dreams are going to come true, and some wonderful amazing things await you.

As for how to deliver that message—I leave that to playing the music and seeing where it takes me.

Mid-July update, and Esme's first faces

As with all summers, this one is flying by faster than I had imagined it would. I've only a moment in between projects, so I'm making this my shortest post ever.

I'm still in home improvement mode, working my way around from room to room, refinishing, re-organizing, repainting. It's pretty gratifying. I've been doing a little (very little) writing, some painting (on canvases), and I'm in the throes of finishing a quilt for Esme. Ada's baby's quilt was done on time. Esme's has been delayed for two years already! Time to get it done. Plus, it's just so inspiring to work with the fabric.

Of course, I am still making little things for an Etsy shop-in-the-works, and things look good on that front. Next week, I will be listing my first paintings for sale.

Esme and Ada are little artists themselves. Esme has been practicing circles for a few months now, and just recently started adding features to make faces. Here are two of her latest beauties. She asked me to put one on the wall, which I was proud to do. We keep looking at it and smiling!

More to come from the blogfront soon. Hope your summer is full of happy moments, too.

General Guidelines for Girls and Lipstick

When you choose a lipstick shade, make it one or two shades more intense than your natural lip color. Or, for a more dramatic look, choose a brighter color.

If you aren't used to wearing makeup, get some help from your best friend. She will give you an honest opinion of how it looks.

Be aware that you may have admirers, and you should treat them with kindness. After all, your beauty is irresistible!

If you are having someone paint your nails, it is a good idea to have something good to read while you wait.

Your smile will always be your best beauty accessory.

A Small List

1. Rainy weather is good weather. A cool front has settled over our island, and the weather has been extraordinarily cool and rainy for weeks on end. I love it. I'm not in good company, though. Each trip into town, I invariably run into someone who moans and groans about how awful the summer is so far. I hold my tongue and make sympathic-sounding noises, but really, I want to say: "Ah, but don't you love how cool and green the mornings are? Look how much money we are saving on air-conditioning! Isn't it better to have this than a drought?"

I keep my silence because I could go on and on, enough to alarm my fellow islander. In fact, I am surprised myself at how much I love the weather. I especially love the strange feeling of mystery that comes along with the unseasonable foggy days. There is none of the melancholy that comes with the autumn fogs, no whisper of fading or death that the fall inevitably brings. Instead, there is just this pure, green, freshness in the fog, and it's exciting in some way, like something powerful and interesting and new is right around the corner.

I've also caught myself spending more time at the window, especially when it rains. My favorite thing to watch is the quick moving storm that drops rain so thickly that sometimes it looks like a curtain, and then, just as suddenly, it fades to an airy, lacy spray. On those afternoons, as soon as the sun smudges yellow against the clouds, the girls and I shout "Rainbow weather!" and run out into the yard to find one.

I have been walking in the mornings, and the air is heavy with the smell of honeysuckle and mimosa. The humid air doesn't discriminate about which scents it carries, and it's an olfactory map of our neighborhood. I like to imagine that if I close my eyes, I could tell by the faintly sick and musty smell of the turtles that I am near the pond to or by the wave of the smell of horses, that I am near the little rise in the road. On clear days, the water of the pond flashes blue and bright, and the leaves are silvery in the sun, and that is lovely too. But as I said, there is something special about the dense feel of the air and the light on a misty day. I think it makes me want to walk around in it more, and that can only be a good thing.

2. We are in a fix-it mode, as our house is about to celebrate its 4th birthday. It's clear that we need to attend to the little things projects now in small increments, or suffer the house needing more extensive work later on. Among our projects are cleaning out the garage, painting the outside trim on the doors and northern windows, cleaning the windows themselves, hanging blinds, repainting trim and doors inside, and repainting any areas that have excessive wear. The list keeps growing, but I must admit that doesn't detract from my happiness when I cross off an item I've completed.

The biggest and most intimidating is the painting. I might enjoy painting a canvas, but I am really poor at painting a wall, on which you are supposed to eliminate brushstrokes. I'm practicing and hoping to get better as we work our way around the house. My husband is much better at making it look neat, so he gets to do the second coats. It's slow work, and the rain makes me space out the steps--prep, tape, paint, paint again, touch up. In between each of these is the cleaning up, and the waiting for the paint to dry or the rain to stop or in some cases, both. It's paying off, though. The laundry room is done, and bright and happy in an orangey shade called Nasturtium (honestly, though I hate the vagueness of paint names, I love the names themselves. Regardless of how it actually looks on the wall, nasturtium has sweet ring to it, doesn't it?). I did the laundry room first because I spend enough time there, and it may as well be cheery and clean. Plus, it's a good testing ground. If I ruin it, I'm the only one who would really notice. I'm glad to say that it came out perfectly. Yay me. Now to get the stuff in there folded, ironed, and put away.

The front door was a more obvious place to begin, and we've been working on it in little phases. As of this morning, it's done! I just put the finishing touches on the front porch by polishing the aluminum threshold. I put away the polish, and felt the good gratification of a job well done when I stepped back and saw our red door and clean white trim. I think I'll keep walking back over there to give myself a mental "pep talk" when I feel like quitting...

3. In all of this, I have been writing in the lucid way that comes when you are writing in your head. The repetitive motions of moving the paint brush, wiping window sills, or pushing an iron are all equally monotonous, and in that, they are equally freeing. Ideas, phrases, and sometimes fully-fleshed out paragraphs come to me while I'm engaged in non-writing activities. And it is writing. I've always believed it so. When I was teaching, I even took the risk of telling my students that "writing in your head" counted. It does count, because even when it's in your head, it's clearly writing, differentiated from regular thinking because it's formed with expression and structure and-- and this is the the biggest difference--an inescapable desire to save it onto paper. Of course, when you're writing in your head, you are the only reader, but it's important to remember that the self is a worthy audience, perhaps the most valuable audience you have.

Now don't go imagining that I gave credit for "writing in your head" when I was teaching. As I would point out to my students, while writing in your head counts, writing counts even more once you put it into text and share it with someone. It was my hope that giving them permission to ponder and listen to their own writing voice would improve their confidence. I like to think it did. When I read my students' work, it was obvious to me which students allowed themselves the space to form their writing before they actually wrote it. Their writing was that much stronger, their "voice" that much clearer.

My voice is coming clearly to me these days, as I wind around the pond. I'm eager to share some of it with you in the next few weeks.