I haven’t been sleeping well since returning from Suffolk. I feel more out of control than I have in some time. I’m missing the shape I had carved in another place and I suppose it is only just beginning to sink in that I’m not going back to that life. Yet I am not at a point where I can really begin again in earnest. I am incubating in a frustrating limbo.
Perhaps my anxiety is compounded by the little escape I made there. The lack of reception enforced cold turkey from both social media and the already diminished communications with my husband. I spent the week reading, sleeping early in the cool quiet nights and waking to the sound of birds that are not gulls.
Our trips to the ocean left me with the impression that I had been floating on a tenuous raft in the elements, the thin line between sea, sky and earth barely discernable in places. Carried by the warm breeze. At points I felt almost as if I was dissolving into those moments, not disappearing but becoming part of the breath of things. I took myself off on small explorations, just me and my dog, finding a reassuring quiet in myself.
Now I feel stifled in the night, glare of a single street lamp and a window open, yet still the room feels airless with these walls raised up all around. I long to take night walks but feel a responsibility to lay here and try to sleep. Clamping shut my eyelids while I still see the shape of the bedroom. Feel my eyes flicker behind them as I think and think and think. And in the morning I am so tired from this constant restless repose that I can barely drag myself from the bed to “Do”. But I must…
And Boudicca, Ursula Kemp, the Yellow Girl. They have fallen very quiet these last two weeks. But I keep a keen ear to that open window and wait for the gentle rasp of one of my muses to creep into this fitful sleep pattern and wake me with a jolt to shock me back into a joyful effortless process of making as the ideas come thick and fast rather than needing to be spooned out with a sieve.
