My mother used to say not sleeping was the sign of a guilty mind. It could have been. There was a lot in my mind to feel guilty about. When you__e drunk and trying to sleep, your thoughts are visited by the ghosts of those deeds whose heat still glows hottest in your personal darkness. Our actions burn much longer than the moments in which they occur. And drunks like me, we hide from the glow of the embers by fueling other fires and hiding within the flames.

The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep.

The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as "the environment" -- that is, what surrounds us, we have already made a profound division between it an ourselves. We have given up the understanding -- dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought -- that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than they other.

We do not know what it's like to be a bat, we do not know what it's like to be in coma. we can't even say that we know what it's like to be sleeping. We can say what it's like to be restored to consciousness after sleeping. If there are no dreams during our sleep then the sleeping life is an empty life. We might say of such a life that it's not like being anything. We protect that life on the assumption that come the morning its normal functions will be restored. Suppose it was the case however that such functions were only restored every two days... every eight days... twice a year but only briefly. I assume the point is clear. Actions that end life are irretrievable. If we are mistaken at that point there is no going back.

It__ perfectly normal, perfectly natural to live in sleep. But to wake up is a revolution in consciousness. To wake up is to break free of nature. To wake up is to rise and unite with the spirit, and nature doesn__ do that for us.

I swoon into a standing eight count. Goddamn, I actually feel my consciousness want to detach and hide like a turtle retreating into a hopelessly soft shell that won't save anyone.