Sunday Blues

I don’t really know how to do sadness. I’m a chipper sort of person and I try and make the best of things. To stay cheerful. Optimistic. It’s hard to find from moment to moment. We ride on the momentum of daily life. Barely stopping for a minute to check in with ourselves.

Maybe today I can just hang out with my sadness. Wrap her up in a warm blanket. Hold her for a while. Read her poems and play her music.

I used to have a cat that was a grouch. A blue Burmese called Nomi. She would lash out at the other cats and swipe passers by on the family bonsai nursery who found her sleeping peacefully in a pot. As a child I believed that only I understood her and that I could sing to calm her down and I would stay close and talk to her in a low voice for a long time until she stopped trying to scratch and bite me. She’d eventually relent and purr or fall asleep. Perhaps I could do that for my sadness today. Let her swipe a few passersby, bite the odd one as a warning. Eventually fall asleep from the effort of being so angry. I have to let the grief wash over me sometimes. But I can’t do it for too long. I worry that if I do that I may never get up again.

My instinct is to keep busy. It starts like an itch or an irritant low in the back and the shoulders. A leg twitch and kick in the pants and it makes me want to move and engage in a lot of creative activity. But it’s all distraction. Sometimes I’ve just got to stay with my sorrow and let it flow over me. But only for five minutes before I get up buy some eggs make breakfast chase the kids homework and piano practice and get off your screens and shall we go for a walk.

So that’s my Sunday morning. How’s yours? I’d better get up before I drown.

Here’s my favourite poem by Robert Graves

She Tells Her Love

She tells her love while half asleep,

In the dark hours,

With half words whispered low:

As Earth stirs in her winter sleep

And puts out grass and flowers

Despite the snow,

Despite the falling snow