oversleeping

i think i have overslept in the past few days and the result is that i am now unable to sleep. when i was sick, i was sleeping 12-14 hours straight and felt like i needed more. five days of doing that in a row and now i am wide awake and haven't slept a wink in 24 hours. this is crazy.....

for lack of anything else to do, i decided to take random pictures in the park. and i am glad i did. i thought it was 6am when i went out but as i started taking pictures, i realized, dang....this is too dark for 6am in the london summer. then i checked my cellphone and bloody hell it was 5am.

i am glad i saw the park when light hadn't fully come. ordinarily, it is filled with screaming children, couples holding hands walking or sitting on the grass oblivious to the screaming children, picnickers and rollerbladers. it was as if i was looking at an entirely different park to one that i knew. my singular memory of it prior to this was a noisy, busy, crowded place. at 5am in the morning, it was deathly silent, lonely. i could feel the park thinking inside its head, wondering what were the kinds of people who would be coming today, the trees stretching their arms anxiously awaiting the gossip that would filter from all the talk and the grass bracing itself for the arrival of the bus and car fumes.

and then i started seeing those headlines flash in my head - 'walker raped in park at 5am in the morning'. i quickly gathered up my things and headed out of there.

i suppose when we see things or people only in one light, we really see them only in a singular dimension. perhaps we like to do that because we like to preserve the memory of who we think they are. in a sense though that is quite shallow, because that would be failing to appreciate the wholeness of something, or someone in all the different kinds of light we could potentially experience them. i suppose it is just natural human impulse to want to preserve or see things in as beautiful a memory as we want it to be. however, even if things turn out to be dark or lonely in a different light, that should only serve to enrich how beautiful they are. things can still be beautiful - even in the dark, even if they look lonely or even menacing.
i also took a photo of a dandelion. i remember once someone told me, 'you remind me of those wildflowers that you can't pick because if you do, the fluff flies away. people get hay fever from it'.

hmmm....i am a dandelion....i give people hay fever.