It’s 4a.m.

I’ve been awake for an hour, and surrender has washed over me.  I know I’m not going to be returning to bed tonight.

I have my small boy in my arms, and he has finally found his way into a peaceful sleep, huffing and sighing the slumber of a baby cutting teeth and learning new things and made restless by any number of other monumental changes in his tiny life.

And I’m wishing, somewhat frantically, that I had my phone with me.

I flip between mindfulness – noticing how laughably (and sadly) lost I feel without stimulus – and sheer desperation, plotting a stealthy move back upstairs to retrieve it, hoping that I don’t wake my wee one along the way.

He snuffles a little, and stirs, and I take a breath.  I sit still.  I sit inside my discomfort.  I make a nest there and look down at the parted lips of my sweet baby, his impossibly long eyelashes.  I look out the window and imagine my neighbours, snuggled, snoring, dreaming.  Gratitude for warmth wraps me in my grandmother’s fleece shawl, which I am thankful to have remembered to toss over my shoulders on my way downstairs, which I am thankful is the symbol of maternal comfort in our house.  My children know to calm their bodies and slow their breath at its softness on their cheeks.

I daydream, a little, about the many cups of tea I will drink this morning, once the sun shines through the windows, in an attempt to shake off this sleepless night.  

I wish I had my phone again.

(a work in progress, this is).

But it’s a lesson, nonetheless.  A realization that I have been too quick to grab for its familiar shape and glowing screen, for the mindless scrolling made justified when I convince myself that I am “looking for inspiration” or “networking.”  I have lost, hopefully only for a short time, the ability to let silence and softness and darkness just be.

I remind myself that it is in this silence and softness and darkness that my intuition awakens.  It is where inspiration lives, and gratitude, and spaciousness, and self-awareness.  It is where I can go to feel found when I feel lost.  It is where time stops and my children stay children, innocent, with impossibly long eyelashes, huffing in their sleep.  It is me.