Within a minute after turning out the light the twitches and itches begin—a zap, a zing like a jubilant pinball machine. And then the thoughts. How can sleep compete with all that racket? I try to resist them as I fall asleep, but it is impossible. I’ve learned that when meditating, I’m supposed to observe a thought and let it go, return to the present moment–my breath, the ambient sounds around me, this moment, this time, this now. But doing that while I’m trying to fall asleep keeps me awake. When I’m falling asleep, I find it’s best to follow the thought and let it unravel into a dream.
The other night I jolted awake to the voice of Richard Farina, the folk singer once married to Joan Baez’s little sister Mimi. He died as a young man in a motorcycle accident. I recently searched for his album Reflections in a Crystal Wind on Spotify. Dug it up from my memory from when I was in my teens. As my husband and I worked on a jigsaw puzzle for date night, I sang the lyrics to these sad, impossible songs of love and hate, war and peace.
“I know this music isn’t to your liking,” I said.
“That’s okay,” my husband said.
He could see I was enjoying myself. I knew all the lyrics. Well, most of them, but I certainly knew the tunes and hummed along with them. One of them stuck in my head: “Pack Up Your Sorrows”
“No use cryin’, talkin’ to a stranger,
Namin’ the sorrow you’ve seen.
Too many bad times, too many sad times,
Nobody knows what you mean.
Chorus: But if somehow you could pack up your sorrows,
And give them all to me,
You would lose them, I know how to use them,
Give them all to me.”
There are many more verses. It’s a great song worth checking out. If you like folk music, that is. That was over a week ago and I’m still humming that song even in my sleep.
I sang the lyrics to these sad, impossible songs of love and hate, war and peace.
So, here’s the thing. How could a decade of such pain and sorrow in my young life from the 1960s, early ’70s have an aura of such bitter sweetness that I would enjoy revisiting it in my old age, lighting up parts of me with dings and chimes like a thrilling pinball game? I don’t have the answers, except that perhaps because that period of my life was filled with such angst and yearning for connection, I still feel its pull.
It draws me inward like a wound needing succor.
Today, I have connection not just with my husband, but with my children, with recovery friends, with colleagues. Maybe the present appeal of that old song comes from the yearning I felt back then. It draws me inward like a wound needing succor. I give that wound, that hurt child succor today and gladly so. I am able to care for her in ways I was unable to back then.
So sing your heart out now, my child, and enjoy the gladness with which you now live!
In the meantime, I try not to sing in my head while falling asleep, but if I do get stuck on a brain worm, I hum Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and voila, brain loop vanquished. The zaps and zings though, only getting out of bed and lying in front of a space heater helps. Don’t ask me why but heat soothes me. Did when I was a teen, too. Some habits never die.
