Play me!
Ah, Bartok...perfect middle of the night music. If you want to be too afraid to walk down the dark hallway back to bed, that is. Nighttime visions of sugar plums and fairies transform into ghoulish figures imposed upon scenes from Alfred Hitchcock movies. Or Teletubbies...more on that later. But this music is apropos to the subject matter below - you'll see. You're listening to the first movement of Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.
I've always been a bit of a night owl. When I was young, I hated going to bed early because I thought I would miss something important. This carried through into my adulthood and until the invention of the DVR - praise Jesus - I would always find things to do around the house or some work that needs to be done just to have an excuse to stay up past 10 pm.
Staying up later usually means you are more tired when you finally go to bed, and that you are more likely to sleep through the night. Yeah. Go ahead and laugh, all my insomniac friends, because we all know that's the biggest lie around. Truth is, if you normally wake up about 3 hours after you fall asleep, it really doesn't matter if you go to bed sort of tired at 9:00 or REALLY tired at midnight. 3 hours later, the lights in your head come on. The only exception to this - for me, anyway - is exercise. I am usually guaranteed some sort of coma-like slumber if I have done my due diligence at the gym or working with the weights in the basement during the day. You'd think this guarantee would keep me disciplined...but alas, here I am at 2:51 am sitting at the table in the living room, waiting for my tea to steep in a mug I bought at the mid level of the Eiffel Tower because I was too chicken to go to the top by myself. Hey - it was really windy.
There is, of course, an evil side to this. For me, waking up in the middle of the night is like being inside my own personal horror story. The random and irrational thoughts that go through my mind are quite possibly the most torturous moments of my life. I read somewhere that when you are sleeping, or semi-asleep, the part of your brain that controls rational thought gets turned off, or slows down, or something. I cling to this Internet Truth with all my might, lest I believe the disjointed impressions of my dreams and their residual thoughts. It must be truth because most mornings I wake up and say to myself, "What was your problem Nicole? Get a grip, girl." And I wonder if that's a microcosm (thank you, Bela Bartok, for making that an everyday word for musicians who actually bothered to study during that section of music history) for life. Problems seem to diminish in scale the farther we get away from them, and years after some trial we wonder - the new, stronger, more experienced self wonders - why we couldn't see the forest for the trees before we went stumbling into it. Everything always seems worse in the middle of terrifying darkness.
Tonight after lying in bed staring at the ceiling for about 2 hours, I turned to my Kindle for relief. I read yesterday's newspaper - scintillating. Then I turned to a book I downloaded after reading a post in a dear friend's blog - you can check that out here, if you'd like. The post is about the trials of faith and uses examples from L.B. Cowman's Streams in the Desert - I recommend it highly. This daily devotional was written by a woman who worked as a missionary in Japan and China in the early 1900's. Her husband's health issues forced them back to the States where she cared for him until his death six years later. She wrote Streams in the Desert out of her incredible life experiences. Tonight I read the entry for August 29 and then decided to leaf back through and catch some that I had missed. It was a treasure trove of comfort and inspiration for thought, speedily guiding me away from the vicious cycle going through my head. What captured me most was the following quote from the August 24 entry:
Staying up later usually means you are more tired when you finally go to bed, and that you are more likely to sleep through the night. Yeah. Go ahead and laugh, all my insomniac friends, because we all know that's the biggest lie around. Truth is, if you normally wake up about 3 hours after you fall asleep, it really doesn't matter if you go to bed sort of tired at 9:00 or REALLY tired at midnight. 3 hours later, the lights in your head come on. The only exception to this - for me, anyway - is exercise. I am usually guaranteed some sort of coma-like slumber if I have done my due diligence at the gym or working with the weights in the basement during the day. You'd think this guarantee would keep me disciplined...but alas, here I am at 2:51 am sitting at the table in the living room, waiting for my tea to steep in a mug I bought at the mid level of the Eiffel Tower because I was too chicken to go to the top by myself. Hey - it was really windy.
There is, of course, an evil side to this. For me, waking up in the middle of the night is like being inside my own personal horror story. The random and irrational thoughts that go through my mind are quite possibly the most torturous moments of my life. I read somewhere that when you are sleeping, or semi-asleep, the part of your brain that controls rational thought gets turned off, or slows down, or something. I cling to this Internet Truth with all my might, lest I believe the disjointed impressions of my dreams and their residual thoughts. It must be truth because most mornings I wake up and say to myself, "What was your problem Nicole? Get a grip, girl." And I wonder if that's a microcosm (thank you, Bela Bartok, for making that an everyday word for musicians who actually bothered to study during that section of music history) for life. Problems seem to diminish in scale the farther we get away from them, and years after some trial we wonder - the new, stronger, more experienced self wonders - why we couldn't see the forest for the trees before we went stumbling into it. Everything always seems worse in the middle of terrifying darkness.
Tonight after lying in bed staring at the ceiling for about 2 hours, I turned to my Kindle for relief. I read yesterday's newspaper - scintillating. Then I turned to a book I downloaded after reading a post in a dear friend's blog - you can check that out here, if you'd like. The post is about the trials of faith and uses examples from L.B. Cowman's Streams in the Desert - I recommend it highly. This daily devotional was written by a woman who worked as a missionary in Japan and China in the early 1900's. Her husband's health issues forced them back to the States where she cared for him until his death six years later. She wrote Streams in the Desert out of her incredible life experiences. Tonight I read the entry for August 29 and then decided to leaf back through and catch some that I had missed. It was a treasure trove of comfort and inspiration for thought, speedily guiding me away from the vicious cycle going through my head. What captured me most was the following quote from the August 24 entry:
"Who has not known men and women who, when they arrive at seasons of gloom and solitude, put on strength and hopefulness like a robe? You may imprison such folk where you please; but you shut up their treasure with them."
Whoa. This is a whole new world of possibility. When life really sucks we tend to think that we are completely alone in whatever we are our suffering - that we have been stripped of everyone and everything that makes us who we are. But in fact, the opposite is true - we are stripped of everything BUT who we are, and the people who love us enough to stick around even when we are being a jerk. Just this past week I look around at all the "projects" I've undertaken in the past 5 months - patched plaster, painted walls, homemade curtains - and I shuddered at the thought that I had been gilding my own cell, my own barrier created to shut out a world of disappointment and seemingly predictable mediocrity. I was creating a haven from a somewhat self-imposed hell. But perhaps I was merely taking my "treasures" - my creative gifts, such as they are, at least, for plaster repair - and using them to dig a tunnel out of my own depression. Is this all an unconscious effort to keep my creative juices flowing, to keep my mind dreaming of the potential around me, even if it was as practical as walls without holes? Something to ponder...
But for now, it's 4:11 am, my tea is cold, and I can now smell yesterday's lunch wafting from the pots in the sink. There's only one thing to ponder about that - back to bed.
But first, back to the Teletubbies, because I'm sure most of you stopped that Bartok recording some time ago. Hey - he's not for everybody. The video below went around the internet a while back. Check it out - it's only 1:42. After resisting the urge to correct his horrible grammar and spelling, I included below the quote from the creator of the video about a similar one he made:
"The concept for this video was simple. The two creepiest things in the world are Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunair and Telletubbies. I simply combined them. The result is something more horrifying than you're wildest nightmares. Sleep well!!"
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