Marrakesh Campsite
I slept for 9 1/2 hours solid last night. I was reading for about 15 minutes and my eyes got heavy. I looked at my watch and saw the time was 10pm and thought that it’s way too early to go to sleep. But remembering that my body clock is adjusting to sunset and sunrise, I decided to go to sleep. My sleep was deep and dreamless. I woke up once to have a wee but I do this now on autopilot. I surfaced a bit after about 8 hours of sleep, which is more than I usually have, and dreamt a lot for the next hour and a half or so. I woke up at 7:30am. This is unprecedented for me.
I remember when I was a child in Ireland in the 1950s. Whenever we got a boil or an infection, it was customary to put a poultice on the wound. If memory serves me right, is consisted of a piece of bread soaked in milk and something else wrapped in a bandage and put around the wound. A few days later, probably when the wound itself had naturally healed, the bandage would be removed and the piece of bread would be a horrible stinking mess. We used to see that as the badness having been drawn out of the wound.
It feels like this a bit now. Instead of badness, it’s tiredness. I think the life I live in Ireland working in mental health, and lots of other things, mean that I’m constantly on the alert and doing things. Not that there’s anything bad about that; indeed I’m quite happy the way things are and I believe I live a life with meaning and purpose, if not wealth!
Knowing that I’m back on the continent of Africa again and the hot sun and the blue sky is like a poultice drawing the exhaustion and the stress out of me. I can feel space forming between my bones and my gait is becoming looser. It’s like my head has finally recognised that I’m not working, I don’t have to do anything, and I really have no control over where I go and how I go there for the next 3 months. My head recognises all of this and eventually sends a signal to my bones saying ‘bones, it’s okay, he’s not working, he’s not doing anything, you can relax’ And relax, my old bones do.
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