Paintings of Naps and Safety Cones
On being scared? Question mark?
Sleep has always been my friend. One of my brothers humble-shames me by calling me an “elite sleeper,” like I have Olympic medals for how good I sleep, someone at the top of their game. For decades I was ashamed of how much I love sleep. But now I don’t care. Especially the older I get, you can’t sleep shame me now, perimenopause.
As a sick youth I’m sure I slept as much as I could because life sucked with colitis and also my meds [bottomless prednisone], and also being depleted [bottom-full diarrhea]. Also, teenagers and their sleep. I was one then, too.
Dogs and cats sleep a lot and I love watching my animal companions at rest. I spend a lot of minutes each day doing this, watching them sleep. Both my dogs seem to dream a lot in hour two of their slumber. They twitch and whinny and vibrate and I want to see the video in their mind’s eye. My cat, who is four million years old in ant-years, sleeps, probably, twenty-one and half hours each day. Are her waking hours more dreamlike than her sleep hours? Like, the reverse of me? What’s the deal, cat? Right…. you’re a cat.
I haven’t been napping very much lately, maybe because the days are now long here in Portland, OR. I painted all of these during the last three months, spring heading into summer, painting naps and not taking them:
Is it a mistake that the last napper I made is neon orange and then this is what got painted next?
I mean, it’s definitely no mistake that we are living in peak safety cone times. Beware. Alert. Stay away. Help. Help is happening. Work in progress. Danger. Open sewer. Lane closure. Relay races. Run me over. I’m a respected boundary. I’m a permeable boundary. I’m not a boundary at all. You can run me over. I bounce right back. But not all the way. Oh, I’m down. Still bright orange. Over here. Look’a me! Witch’s hat. Melted.
Seeing themes emerge and evolve and keeping myself guessing is one of the things I love most about making work and looking at other people’s work. I don’t want to overthink it because it’s a version of feeling space where I seem to be generative, but just to say, it has to be a type of feeling that doesn’t indulge in the feeling, if that makes sense. So I’m not emotionally active, but neutrally observing facts. The facts of being. There's a time you gotta go and show / You're growin' now, you know about / The facts of being.
That’s what a meditation practice does: spotlight feelings, are those feelings facts, then let the facts/feelings go, clear the decks, let the program run, don’t run the program. I think that’s what sleep does, too. Naps metabolize the shit out of life and trauma. Shouts turn into whispers. Whispers become fewer and farther in between. Disclaimer - shouting can happen again and it will.
But is that always the case? I had a massage the other day to help soothe my right arm and shoulder and thirty minutes in, it was evident that I was really, really scared even though I was not actively feeling afraid. I became keenly aware that my rusty bones and jerky-like fascia act as shields in this defensive, low self-esteem of a hunchback that I inherited. My posture is so loudly defensive, yet self-defeating, a bizarre combo that is really hard to look at. That shit is physical and psychological - nature and nurture - chicken and egg - show AND tell - epigenetic trauma. Epic and genetic. That’s being female bodied, in case you didn’t know.
I do know for sure that my nervous system does NOT feel safe these days, but I’m not emoting or even experiencing that. Somatitizazizozation. It’s embodied. I get massages so I can comprehend what’s really going on with me. Connect the literal dots of my corporeal, emotional and nervous self. The felt self. The felted self. Self on a shelf. Self no longer on a shelf. Shellfish self. Selfish shell. Shells. Selves. Toemaytoe. Towmahtow.
I’m not consciously afraid on the daily, like I try to understand global headlines, but I’m numb and my thumb hovers over the news app on my phone, twitching, wanting to swipe left like the Trump presidency is a Tinder profile. So, I don’t “feel” afraid, but I’ve been curling into myself and I bloat and bluster to ward off, well, anything, I suppose. My right shoulder and arm in particular curl forward and then my left side curls in and it all makes my heart little. I want to have a big heart, though. So, no more safety cones, right? Or would I need ALL the safety cones?
I’m not sure what’s going on or how many naps or safety cones are the right numbers or how to know and if I do know, if it matters right now. But, it’s naps and safety cones for now and let me know if you need me to be your safety cone while you nap. Nap, people. Nap. Let your body rest so you can metabolize the hours before and wake up. We’ll keep waking up, we will and remember, the more naps you take, the more you wake up. 😊
