Lately, I have wanted deeply to rest. When my kids were young, I began to understand how my mother used to say to us girls when we were wearing on her last nerve, “I need to go lie down.”
What sounded boring as a kid became a delight. I remember my son's pediatrician asking, how is everyone sleeping? Well past the age when everyone should be sleeping well, and me thinking, when will this ever end? But my kids are, for the most part, grown, and I have been waking up earlier than usual. Now that I can sleep, I can’t. What used to be 6:00 a.m. has now crept into 5:00 a.m. and 4:45 a.m., truly an ungodly hour or perhaps the most godly hour of all. It depends who you ask.
A mediumship tutor told me that the reason I was being woken up so early was because of a past life connection to studying as a monk. I considered the theory that my soul remembers waking before sunrise to sit in silent meditation. I wanted to laugh this off but couldn’t because of a recurring dream I used to have as a teenager about a burning monk.
Quang Duc's self-immolation was done to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government on June 11, 1963. Around 1994, I began having a dream that I was watching a burning man in an orange robe sitting completely still. Then the dream would change, and I was the burning man. I had no context for the dream when I first experienced it.
A year later, I took a high school class called History of the Vietnam War. When Mr. Rodriguez played live footage of the monk being doused with gasoline and lighting himself on fire, I felt the earth tilt. This was a real event. I didn’t realize back then that it was possible to have a memory of something before it happened. Time is funny like that. I believe my dream started because watching the video in my high school class affected me so deeply. I tried to analyze my dream and look behind the layers of it.
Maybe you are thinking, but it could be a past life. I understand the preoccupation with past lives, but I have felt too overwhelmed and fascinated with this life to give them much attention lately. I have too many past versions of myself to sort through. Parts of me I’ve forgotten.
Mr. Rodriguez, or Mr. Rod, as we called him, is the only teacher’s name I can recall from high school. Now that I’ve written that, I just remembered Ms. Schwait, my dear art teacher who allowed me to take three AP art classes my senior year despite having no real dedication or plans to pursue art. Her kindness allowed me to rest and make it through. But that’s all I retained after four long years. Like the kids in Charlie Brown, most teachers blurred into a droning monotone.
Even the administrator who looked me in the eyes and told me, “I will make it my personal mission to see that you don’t graduate,” his name escapes me. It was a letter abbreviation, Mr. A or Mr. C?
I do remember faces. I remember the student who walked a few paces ahead of me at graduation with his long legs and ankles showing because his gown was too short, small nicks on his chin where he had presumably cut himself shaving. When he shook Mr. Letter Abbreviations' name instead of saying thank you, like everyone else, he subtly said fuck you, in a way that was calm and polite enough to let the ceremony continue undisturbed. When we sat down, I gave that student a look that said you are my personal hero. He stared straight ahead, not needing or wanting any thanks. He had been ready to self-destruct for his beliefs.
The need to rest feels frightening. I want to resist it, fight against it. I feel panicked at the thought of slowing down. I push myself to walk in the mornings. My wife is a morning person, and I can count on her to be up and going for a walk by 6:00 a.m. at the latest. She is teaching me about anti-matter from a BBC documentary before my eyes are fully open. Anti-matter is a substance that has the opposite electric charge of matter and, when coming in contact with matter, annihilates it. One gram of anti-matter would be like an atomic bomb, but don’t worry; humans are able to create that much. We’ve barely created enough anti-matter to boil a tea kettle. So, that is a relief.
It’s invigorating being outside before the world is awake. We pass by a tuxedo cat sleeping in a window. Rachel calls him the sentinel because he usually keeps watch through the window. Lately, he is asleep at his post, like me. Is he getting old? Am I? Is it the moon phase? The change of season?
We pass by another cat named Richard, who is sitting alert on a flower bed. He is an outdoor cat, one of five in our neighborhood. I tell Richard to be good and give him a stern look. Last year, my son rescued a baby bunny from his clutches. Before I learned Richards's name, I was calling him Mike Myers for the way he stalked me, seeming to appear out of nowhere when I was trying to return baby bunny to his nest. I was never able to find it. I took him to a wildlife sanctuary, and he didn’t make it. The volunteer told me that life is so fragile for bunnies at that age that they almost never survive any type of accident. Every time I see a bunny near my home now, I wonder if they are any relation. Do they miss one another? Are they grieving? Please stay away from the road and stay away from Richard, I implore them.
I’ve taken care to learn the other cats' names in the neighborhood. There is Richard, Pinocchio, Berlioz, a large fluffy orange Cat named Donald Trump. We call him DT for short, the poor thing, and there is a small calico whose name rhymes with Balenciaga, but I can never remember what it really is.
Richard will absolutely spend the rest of the day terrorizing local mice, and then he will unabashedly sleep stretched out in the hostas. Regardless of his age, the moon phase, or the change of season, Richard will pursue what he desires with passion. This morning, I considered perhaps he was a monk in his past life, dedicated and disciplined, ready to burn alive for his beliefs. It would only be fair then that he reap the reward of a killer cat's existence. Richard even has a miniature bench like the kind you’d see in Central Park. Even though he is an outdoor cat, he is well-loved and the most innocent-looking of the bunch. Isn’t that always the way?
A few months ago, Rachel interrupted him from catching a mouse. He glared at us, telling us with his eyes that he’d resume his hunt as soon as we left him to it. So, for all I know, Richard has a grudge against me and curses me to be a mouse in my next life. Luckily, curses aren’t real, and I’m not thinking about future or past lives right now.
When I look beneath the surface of my fear of resting, I find the fear that I will not be able to keep up with my work and the things and people I love. When I look beneath the surface of that, I find a fear of not being good enough, like walking into the same wall over and over. It’s something that seems to be preprogrammed, a life lesson that I come back to. If I were to knock down that familiar wall, I’d find love—the desire to love and be loved.
I believe we are all love at our core. I shared this with a client recently, and she strongly disagreed. “What about people who hurt animals?” she almost shouted at me. I resisted telling her about Richard (kidding), but I had to agree those people are some of the worst. Still, I have never met anyone who was all bad, who had no love at their core.
I am not afraid of people as much as I am afraid of not being productive. As much as I am afraid of losing love. When I ask the spirit world for the answer to why I need so much rest, there is no answer, only the guidance to surrender to it. “You are doing a lot,” I hear. In this season, I am the sentinel cat, watching from indoors and sleeping when I can.
There is so little we need to do to find love in the world, and yet so much of our motivations lie in holding onto it. When we act from fear, it is the fear of losing what we love. Looking beneath the layers of my morning, my life, my past, and my motivations all bring me back to love.
With Love,
Sheryl
P.S. Thank you for reading The Electric Curtain. If you’d like to support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber, commenting, or sharing this post with a friend.
If you’re looking for more ways to connect…
Uncovering Intuition: The Course helps you learn to trust yourself.
Here are more ways to work with me
you can still get a signed copy of my book, Uncovering Intuition, here