Sleepless With Chronic Pain

My Middle of Night Process

(It’s 3:56 a.m. I’m wrestling with pain and nerve activation that has prevented almost any sitting and little sleep for the last 10 weeks. This was how my process went.)

The electricity in me doesn’t sleep.

It was most recently awakened by a bulging disc impinging on a nerve bundle in my spine. Just a tiny bulge leaning ever so slightly leaning on a nerve. And yet… FIRE POWER.

“I have been here for a thousand years,” it says. “I make thought, memory, desire. I open doors. I tear down walls. You think you’re afraid of the dangers of life – things that can unhouse, unsettle, shake your roots, your security-minded calculations. But actually, you’re frightened of me – the radical life force moving through your body. Afraid of you.

And the other voice, reasonable, kind, well-meaning as a warm blanket at 4.a.m. “rest now, tomorrow is a big day. The body needs, obligations and responsibilities need, —”

But the spirit is already out of the bottle.

In the old Grimm tale “The Spirit in the Bottle,” a boy walking in the forest hears a voice calling from a sealed flask at the base of a great oak. He opens it, releases the spirit — ancient, enormous, dangerous — then panics, tricks it back in, negotiates terms before daring to lift the lid again. That boy and I know each other. We have met in other transforming moments. And I know, though I wrap it it doubt: once it’s fully out, it cannot be contained. The tectonic plates will shift and I won’t be able to stand on the same Earth as I had been.

Years ago in Minnesota in my early thirties, I had a dream that I’ve carried like a canteen of elixir in my backpack ever since. In the dream I was hosting a breakfast for several dear friends. I prepared delicious french toast and went to the refrigerator to choose between two syrups: one was Log Cabin, 99% corn syrup and coloring, the chemistry of sweetness without the thing itself. The other was real maple syrup — alive, uncontrollable. I wanted to offer the real thing. I brought it to the table and opened the jar. Out came the plagues of Exodus — insects, frogs, locusts — filling the room, then the house, then spreading into the street, into the neighborhood. Because I had chosen the living thing. Because I had brought what was real to the table instead of the imitation.

I am sure those plagues kept me awake then. They demanded the end of building pyramids, enslaving soul to from testaments to accomplishment, capacity, and pride.

My father’s fists were electricity too.

I didn’t know that at six or seven, though I knew even then that something was wrong — that my family was lying about itself, that the man who came home consumed by money and its terrors was carrying a current he didn’t know how to hold. What the world had done to him, what it had demanded of him, came home raining and raging in fists and snapping belts. His electricity, with no other channel. His plagues unleashed without consciousness.

He passed it down.

It moves through me differently — into words, into students whose eyes open, into the one who finally understood what church he had been avoiding. But it is the same voltage. The same insistence.

“I’m not done with you yet.”