Glorious weather – yesterday, and now again today. Tomorrow will change – rain, colder, etc. But today will be pleasant.
I didn’t manage to sleep through the night, though. Woke up thirsty at 3:30a.m., and tried to ignore it. But after another twenty minutes or so, I capitulated and got up to get some water. Then I lay awake for gods know how long. It must have been a few minutes before 4a.m. when the first birds started chirping and trilling. The sun hadn’t yet risen, but I assume it was “first light” (or “nautical twilight”).
As the concert grew louder, spreading in area near and far as well as in participants, I had this image come into my head of the sun’s first light waking the birds as though they were a crust upon the earth, and the first light a spatula lifting this encrustation into awakening from underneath. That is, the first light wasn’t descending on them from above, but lifting them up from below.
Also important in this somewhat horrifying imagery was the idea of the earth’s birds being such a multitude, so flockalicious (but not necessarily delicious), so thickly settled on the planet, roosting or nesting or however it is that birds sleep and disappear when they’re not flying through the air, that they form a crust, an actual layer on the land. The first light as spatula was getting underneath them, lifting them into wakefulness.
And then I thought, “airquake.” The air is their element, and each day as the earth turns and the first light reaches all “corners” of the globe (talk about circling the square – or squaring the circle), it causes an airquake which wakes the birds. That’s why they’re up so early. If there were an earthquake every morning, I suspect we humans and all animals that make earth their element would wake up from its effects. Birds are woken daily by the airquake of the first light. Anyway, that’s my theory.
After that I lay awake worrying about my broken oven window problem. At some point I was finally asleep again, till 6:20a.m., but back to snoozing till eight.
Yesterday we Skyped with A. – that was nice. I sent him some Nassim Nicholas Taleb video links and other stuff, and read Taleb’s section on “Seneca’s Barbell” from Antifragile to him and W.
We took a nice long walk to Brackenbury in the lovely cool air. Such delightful weather.
When I got home, B. pinged me from Florence and we set up a Skype call. She had an interesting meeting at the event she attended last week: writers, editors, agents. One of the resource persons at the event is from my neck of the woods, albeit a couple of towns north of me. She writes her books on the commuter rail to Boston (and back). Pretty impressive – the train ride can be …meh, not sure how to put it: uncomfortable? She must have great concentration and probably has conditioned her mind to it as a stimulus.
