Night Owl

Powerful owl by WikiWookie (cc)

I've been hearing him outside most nights lately.  Oooh, he says I don't know how many houses or streets away, and it echoes into the air, reminding us that we live on the side of a hill.

If I was going to have any sort of a totem, surely it would be him.  On rare occasions he will come sleep on the branch of a tree that we can see from the decking.  If I lean out of bed in the mornings when he is there, then hypothetically (the window is dirty) I would be able to see him.  I feel both a sense of cameraderie, but also a feeling-better-by-comparison when I see nocturnal animals asleep at the time I finally manage to haul my arse out at 9am or thereabouts (if infection persists, add an extra hour).

My mind ran ragged all day today, in some sort of a PTSD twitch, flitting from one thing to another, feeling stressed and anxious and ungrounded, unsafe.  And then this evening my mind settled and so now, suddenly, everything is much too interesting to sleep.  Why would I want to sleep?  I'm here in front of the computer working and I've still got a stack of different webpages open and I'm still flitting from one subject to another - to yoga pages to remind me why I really want to pick up my practice again even though some strange part of me doesn't, to an author whose creativity books I like, to how-to articles about internet CSS, and suddenly while they all looked interesting before, now they look even more interesting because it is the night, my body's weak, I'm on the run, no time to speak*, and the dark outside feels warm and enclosing, like black velvet, and I am inside, and the interwebs is a magic.

Oooh.

*This song qualifies as an earworm because:
(a) it rotates in my head; and
(b) I hate it.
Thus being the qualifications for earwormery.