There’s always been something comforting about the night; such nocturnal creatures as are we who emerge from our daylight slumber to open our eyes, stretch our wings, and take flight under an inky blanket of stars and sky. There is a peace to the night, yet it is rarely peaceful; we hunt at night, we feed at night, we love at night, and we give life to the things which occupy our daydreams but could never survive under the burning glare of sunlight or the locked convention of expectations about who we are and how our lives are supposed to be defined. We live for the night, and when the witching hour draws near, we feel the fire coursing through our veins, blood filled with electric excitement being pumped from our hearts as the first slices of moonlight reach the glassy retina of our shimmering souls, and the first quivers of instinct fills our minds. This, for we who love the night.

Ever since I was in my twenties, I think probably just after I gave birth to my son, the way my body seeks and accepts sleep has more or less been turned upside down from the way most people live their lives. I function during the day. I do my job, I do my errands, I take care of my family, and I lead my life, but who I am doesn’t escape this mortal shell during the daylight hours, that I find, is what comes out at night. For the past decade or so I’ve fought this battle of insomnia, that is, the battle that I initiate which tries to force my body to sleep at night and perform at its best during the day; but it’s been a losing battle. I never sleep for more than four hours at a time, and when I wake, again usually in the middle of the night, or the wee hours of the morning depending on your point of view, that is when I feel most alive and in reality is when I’m most comfortable with myself and who I am. So perhaps the answer is to stop fighting it and accept the fact that I am indeed a creature of the night.

When I wake, I often find that my mind is running so fast that I wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep even if I tried, and believe me, I’ve tried. But what I’ve also found is that the ideas which occupy my mind in the still of darkness, want to come out; and it’s this fire, this passion, which becomes my writing. Words run through my mind, entire sentences, entire paragraphs written out in my mind. I can see the words, I can hear myself saying them, speaking them as if having a conversation with an imaginary audience; and so now when this happens, I’ve learned to get up and simply just write. It’s very much like the way I compared writing to breathing, you just do it without any real thought or effort. The words simply flow and then become much of what you read here in this digital diary, this dalliance with cyberspace that I’ve come to accept as part of my life, or for at least the immediate future.

Sometimes I’m stirred awake by a sound; sometimes by the windchimes which hang outside my window. Last summer my husband and I spent many late afternoons as the hot sun began to set, working out in the yard, hanging windchimes in the trees and around our home; these instruments left about to be played by mother nature at her convenience and for our pleasure. My favorite windchime is the one which hangs outside one of the windows in my bedroom. It’s high in the air, and because of how our house is situated on the property, the wind whips around the dormer and catches this five belled brass chime and causes it to sing. On very windy nights especially, we can be serenaded for hours by the subtle and sublime music of the world turning around, winds which come and go, leaving only a song as evidence that they were here.

My house is very quiet at night, not at all silent, but quiet just the same. I take advantage of this time to sit with my thoughts, write, and fill my own mind with knowledge and hopefully come up with a little piece of wisdom every now and again. I’ve been spending some time thinking about my journal here; not so much in terms of the small things, but what it represents in the larger sense. In one way losing an entire year plus of work is a huge loss for me. My site still gets hits, and I imagine will continue to get hits for a long time from people using the vast array of search engines available to find things, looking for pages which are not there anymore. Maybe they wonder what happened. Maybe they stay and look around, or maybe they just go on to the next likely hit to satisfy whatever it was that they were trying to find. That doesn’t matter tho. Already the automated spiders which crawl the net have descended on my new creations and the people continue to come. So even tho I lost something, what I’ve gained has turned out to be far more precious and valuable to me than any record of what I’ve already accomplished; what I’ve gained is myself and my perspective and my desire to create and to write. The lessons I have learned about myself and the people around me never would have been gleaned had these things not happened exactly as they did, so in effect, I have to give thanks to the universe for the lessons she taught me, and for the gift of insight that I’ve been given.

I don’t look at my journal’s statistical reports with any great frequency, tho sometimes it’s interesting to watch them move in real time; the searches people are doing, the hits from around the world, and what pages are being read, or if someone new is linking here. What’s fascinating is watching the progression of the day move around the world. Depending on what time of day it is when I look at my stats, I can tell what part of the world is waking up, and what part of the world is moving into darkness. It starts with Australia, a mere fifteen hours behind me, and from there it moves to Malaysia, then Japan, then Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, Western Europe, London, and then the US. As I refresh the page I can see this progression of time measured only by the traffic to my site, and yet it always moves, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. There’s always somebody visiting.

Updates and Information

I’ve added a new category called Issues, and like the name suggests, what will occupy that blog within a blog will be topics that affect the world we live in. Not always directly about me or my life, but like anything else I write, the only point of view I can truly offer is my own. I have a piece in their now about Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, and how several states are trying to make these vaccinations mandatory for our daughters. This is as they say a story with legs, and from what I understand, a report on NBC’s Today Show this morning will address the topic of mandatory Gardasil vaccinations. You’re invited to read and comment on my entry here.

I’ve also been adding to my Toys category, so there’s some new things in there too, tho nothing absolutely new yet. And the blogroll is online!

After several email conversations with a friend, I decided that I did want a blogroll, but I didn’t necessarily want it on the first page, basically because it’s very big and takes up a lot of real estate, so it now appears in the far column of every sub page and is much more prominent on the Links page. I truly hope that no one is offended by this, because no offense is intended, but as I rethink my journal I’ve come to the conclusion that indeed the world is not flat, nor is this site. I want to stretch out and expand what I do in and with this space, and in keeping with those goals, that is where I decided to put my blogroll.

We also discussed the topic of negative energy, and I’ve begun to think of negative energy as a monster of sorts which lives inside each of us, but requires sustenance to survive. Negative energy consumes everything, and it often causes the negative energy inside each of us to bubble up to the surface, growing and consuming us like a virus or malignancy. No matter what we do, we will always have this battle within ourselves with our own dark demons, but in meditating on these things I have come up with this idea that I’d like to share; negative energy needs to be fed in order to survive, so the only way to defeat negative energy is to let it starve. That’s my wisdom for the day. Think about it, and see if it makes sense to you.

I’ve also received a lot of emails asking for passwords to various pages which are still protected; the only reason the passwords are there is because I haven’t finished with those pages yet. Once they’re done, the password protection will be removed, tho a few pages will continue to be protected only because the things there are not for public consumption.

I’m also working on some new things for my Lessons category, and I’ve got some other new things which should be ready soon. Even tho I am a creature of the night, there are only so many hours in any given day, and everything must fall on those delicate scales of balance.

Oh! Good news! Pitchers and Catchers today everyone! Spring Training is here! I think we might take a family trip to Florida over school vacation to catch some Red Sox spring training! Because I grew up in Connecticut, we were always confused about whether to be Yankess or Red Sox fans, but when I came to Boston, that quandary was pretty much settled. There is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing in the world like watching a baseball game at Fenway Park. My father liked the Red Sox, but my brothers liked the Yankees, and unfortunately they still do. We’ve had more than our share of arguments at family get-togethers about this very subject, and yes, after the Sox won the World Series, the tone of those arguments certainly changed.

Enjoy your Tuesday everyone!