Spring, troubled sleep, and a prayer for peace

Peepers!! Finally!!

I love the sound of peepers in the late evening, almost as much as I love the treble song of the birds in the early morning. I'm grateful for the chance to sleep with the window open, and to have the incessant hum of the humidifier silenced for the season. I'm not one who needs a background noise to sleep, not an artificial one, anyhow. But I do so love to hear the little night noises of the outside world. I feel like I have a place in the cycle of things.

That said, I did not sleep well last night, not once my busy brain kicked in with yet another apocalyptic dream. A few days ago, we had an all-staff training about active shooters and our comprehensive safety/defense plans at school; how we, both as a team and as individuals, must be prepared to protect our students and ourselves. No great surprise, then, that my brain kicked up a stressful scenario for my dream-sleep "entertainment." This stress-dream was punctuated with a lot of broken shards of glass, as there were bombs and other incendiaries involved. It probably doesn't help that I'm reading a novel set in WWII London, and the main character is part of the civil patrol/defense that walked the streets nightly, putting out fires and so on. 

I am very tired of "putting out fires," even in training scenarios. The news this morning is playing clips from the NRA convention, where there are rabid white males (mostly) yelling about guns and rights and death penalties for mass shooters and armed guards at schools. All of this is so toxic. The root causes of violence are never considered when it comes to large groups of people who are in love with guns. The rhetoric is always about what to do after the fact, or what they'd do (!!) if confronted with such devastation. Few of them have any actual experience with this sort of violence, so it's all hot air and brash shouting, with no solutions in sight. Well, the solutions are there, but o...their rights... never mind, my right and the rights of our school children to make it to recess or get a good night's sleep.

Again, I am very tired of "putting out fires," and my dreams are too often exactly about that. If we could all find our place in the cycle of the natural world, things would be a lot less stressful, I think. 

Pray for peace.

C