I overslept this morning

When I do that, I always have a sense that something is wrong. Although I have not been clinically depressed for a long time, I associate the desire to stay in bed with that period of my life. When I was a teenager, it was my go to solution to all of my problems. Stay in bed until everybody else had left the house.

Getting up early feels like freedom to me. Staying in bed feels like prison It’s what I do when I feel locked up. When I don’t want the world to impose upon me.

But eventually I got up. Three hours past the alarm. Finding my path through the dark to the light switch. The morning has waited for me. My bedroom is almost windowless, so 5 a.m. or 8:00 a.m. it looks pretty much the same.

But my body and my spirit know that something is out of kilter. I’m sailing into strange waters. On mornings like this I feel that I awake in a fog. Confused at the change, my body and mind cannot feel at home in the space I inhabit. The light is wrong. The sounds are wrong. I see how crookedly the pictures hang on the wall. They must have been crooked before but in my variegated state it is more noticeable.



The guards of my territory are not standing at attention. They are playing dice in a corner and I am the prize.

Most mornings, you see, I am aware of the spirits that guide and comfort me. I call them in, good neopagan shaman that I am. If not formally, with rattle and drum, at least informally with a candle and a moment’s awareness of the four directions. I work at this. My room has an altar to my ancestors and other honored dead. I burn incense, light candles, chant songs in a language of my own, all the usual potpourri of the modern mage.

There are days like this one, though, when I come unmoored. And then the spirits do as well, and they don’t guide me but haunt me. That is what this late morning is like.



Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

I name it good, light a candle, wish the ghosts a good morning, and launch into my daily writing practice.

Boo to you!