Awakenings

An after-effect of my pop-culture driven academic interest in the occult is that today after waking up and wishing I hadn't bothered, was that I came to the realisation that today is a fairly special day. Today is Imbolc. Ancient pagan festival day. Comes from the Gaelic for "in the belly," and is traditionally one of the four more important Sabbats out of eight. If I remember correctly, it's supposed to be about the beginning sparks of light in winter, a celebration of the faintest glimmers of the awakening of nature.

Strange, then, that I should find it such an insurmountable challenge to get out of bed.

I swear, if my alarm wasn't also my mobile phone, then it would almost certainly be in pieces halfway across my room.

It's a day of awakening, and yet whilst walking, talking, and taking notes on Euclid's Algorithm, I am still far more than half asleep.

The world is a motion picture, grainy and static-ridden. There's an evil grinning goblin turning a handle, making the day reel past me, slightly blotchy and uncomfortably blurred. If I listen carefully, I think I might just be able to hear some demented piano accompaniment. The world flickers past, I'm asleep, and bleary is monotonous is physically abstract is oh-so-cryptic.

I opened my eyes this morning in the surreal pain of consciousness, and the first thing I saw was my map of Middle Earth, blue-taced illicitly to my wall. I lay in the warmth, reluctant, staring at it for several minutes, and I woke up with something I wanted to blog about. Nature waking up, me not waking up, the possibility of nature being a sleepyhead too, and there was a link to the map that made sense when I was still half asleep. It's a very pretty map. Has the the trees drawn on where there are forests. Maybe that was it. Map has forests has trees equals nature equals ancient celtic festival.

Anyway, maybe nature is indeed as lethargic as me right now, because the day is still gloomy. The streets are strewn with polluted puddles, the concrete - dead.

The message being, that the rest of the world can smeg off, I'm going back to sleep.