Something a bit more peaceful.

(A "change of venue" did help; I finally went home, ate a peanut butter sandwich and drank some juice, and was able to rewrite part of the paper. I think part of my problem is that I try to do the whole thing in one sitting and get overwhelmed. I think also - and this is my Rain Man qualities coming out again - that I do not like all the "comments" and "tracked changes" taking up room on the page. This particular co-author is tremendously fond of the "Track Changes" function in Word; I hate it. I cannot rewrite effectively with all the evidences of my past failures [as I take them to be] staring me right in the face. So I switched to working longhand on a legal pad and consulting the printout of the manuscript as little as possible.)

Anyway.

The other night I had a vivid bad dream; I'm almost embarrassed to report it here because it's something that would very unlikely ever happen to me, and there are people not 100 miles from me who are dealing with the aftereffects of the very thing. So it sounds very "poor me" to me, when I really have nothing to be "poor" about over it.

I dreamed that I was trapped by a flood. I'm not going to write out the details of it but it was the sort of ominous dream where you realize at one point that you are really screwed and there is nothing you, personally, can do to get out of a bad situation.

And at that point - I think it was something like 4:10 am on Wednesday - I decided there was no going back to sleep at that point, so I just got up.

So the past few days I've been a little nervous about the rain. Whenever it rains hard I go to my front door and peer hard at the street and wonder if it's flooding. (And, intellectually, I know that being trapped in my home by rising floodwater is unlikely to impossible. I do not live within a mile of any creeks, even, and the nearest river [a small river at that] is more than 5 miles away. And my house is about 6' above street level (I am on a little hill) so even if there were a rain-induced flash flood, surely it would run off before it even touched the foundation. But still.)

I'm beginning to get over it a bit, but sometimes having a bad dream is a bit like getting the stomach flu after eating, say, Emmenthaler cheese - it is a long time before you can even LOOK at that cheese again without feeling a bit queasy, even though you know your flu was caused by a virus and not by the cheese.

But I'm looking for bits and pieces of things to contemplate while I attempt sleep. And I found a poem I like, in one of those little "Everyman Pocket Poets" books.

It is called - at least in the book I have, "Lord, let your light be only for the day." It comes from something called the Nechum Bronze (no date is listed but I kind of feel like it's probably not earlier than 18th century from the tone of the poem, but that might just be the translation. And the Internet is uncharacteristically unrevealing of information - the only site mentioning the Bronze gave a version of this poem, and the person posting it said she didn't know if Nechum Bronze was a person's name, or a literal bronze.). It's translated by the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, or so the attribution goes:

Lord, let Your light be only for the day,
And the darkness for the night.
And let my dress, my poor humble dress
Lie quietly over my chair at night.

Let the church-bells be silent,
My neighbour Ivan not ring them at night.
Let the wind not waken the children
Out of their sleep at night.

Let the hen sleep on its roost, the horse in the stable
All through the night.
Remove the stone from the middle of the road
So the thief may not stumble at night.

Let heaven be quiet during the night.
Restrain the lightning, silence the thunder,
They should not frighten mothers giving birth
To their babies at night.

And me too protect against fire and water,
Protect my poor roof at night.
Let my dress, my poor humble dress
Lie quietly over my chair at night.


I like the imagery of the simple things - the dress lying quietly over the chair, the hen roosting in the barn. I like how it starts out sort of intimately - the speaker and her dress - and then circles out into the larger world (to even encompass the heavens) and then, at the end, returns to the speaker's circle - she asks that her roof be protected, and again, that her dress be protected. The speaker in the prayer even asks that thieves not stumble in the night (though I'm not sure if that's to preserve the nighttime silence, or if it's out of a humanitarian impulse towards the thieves themselves). I think I was particularly drawn to it now because of the lines:

"Let heaven be quiet during the night.
Restrain the lightning, silence the thunder,
They should not frighten mothers giving birth
To their babies at night."

And I would add, so that restless sleepers prone to nightmares not be troubled by them at night.