I want to sleep

A poem

I don’t like book clubs. I never have.

Many of you like them and enjoy them. I am not judging them. There are few activities better than discussing books. Often, after reading a book, there is a certain burning desire to talk to someone else about it. Of this, I can understand.

But, a book chooses you and not the other way around. And book clubs, while they often choose worthy books and have excellent people present to discuss them, they rarely align, in place and time, with my soul.

For example, I have tried to read Don Quixote a few times, and I can tell my soul is resisting that book. But how do I know it is resisting? Because I know the feeling when alignment occurs — when the reading flows as effortlessly as water. Recently, for me that was War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.

In many ways, which I won’t get too much into here, I felt it was book that was waiting for me my entire life. If I was to read it five years ago, I would have not been ready for it. If I would have waited a year, I would have slept on it.

There is something in Tolstoy that is stirring me. He went through a deep spiritual crisis at 50 or so. He thought he was wasting his life with two amazing novels. He witness one public execution in Paris and is so shocked, he vows to never serve the state again. Tolstoy, by his own admission, “committed every crime,” in his youth, and took on an overt transformation.

But, to a degree, this is the run-of-the-mill spiritual transformation that is over-sold by televangelists. Come on in boys, the water is fine! Perhaps Tolstoy did knock down that Piggly Wiggly in Yazoo:

This kind of transformation has a distinctive “wake-up” feel to it; a Matrix-like red-pill. The call is to wake-up, realize the world is not like it is. Even the great poet Kabir says (Robert Bly translation):

You have slept for millions and millions of years.
Why not wake up this morning?

But lately, all I want to do is sleep.

I fell asleep one day reading Tolstoy. His non-fiction tends to do that. I didn’t dream, but when I woke I had a vision. It was not formed by my morning-consciousness, it was already there. Like an unread direct-message to myself that slipped in under the covers of silent notifications.

These images are fleeting and fickle. Any movement or muscle or thought can erase them. But, I tried to capture it:

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I’m ready for my daily death in sleep,
with the slowness of my breath, I seek sinless sleep.

Everyone wants to change the world,
I want to change myself. So first I must sleep.

An oath I once swore to defend my country,
reading those words now puts me to sleep.

I resisted evil with fire, which only grew the fire.
The heat smothered me to a sweaty sleep.

Two swords are not worth one cloak,
which blankets me to peaceful sleep.

Caesar may have his coins back,
they are stained and are of no use in sleep.

The hour has already come,
it is time to sleep.

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