I may be losing my mind...

Did you ever wonder what your brain thinks when you are not paying attention? The brain is made up of three major parts; the cerebrum which is the part of the brain I'm about to talk about, as well as the cerebellum which controls balance and coordination and the brain stem which controls the automatic functions - breathing, digestion, heart rate and blood pressure.

The cerebrum is the part which does the thinking, remembering, problem solving, feeling and movement. The cerebrum is the part which we are conscious of. Now of course there are many more parts to the brain and much more detail about the functions of each part. I'm not here today to give a lesson on the brain function, just where my thoughts led me last night.

So, last night I was, as has become usual, lying awake in the wee small hours. I wake at around 2am each morning and then can't go back to sleep for about three hours. It's very annoying as it makes me tired and irritable the next day. With this in mind I was determined to break the wakeful habit and banish my old friend insomnia. I decided to do this by using one of my old methods, counting.

I have rules of course about counting to get myself to sleep. The idea is that I bore myself to sleep so I count very methodically. Whenever my brain goes wandering off on its own I start again from the beginning. Usually I don't get very far over 100 because I have to start over so many times.

Last night I didn't get to 30 for about two and a half hours. I would get to 28 or 29 and then realise that my brain had gone off for a stroll down a little used corridor and was thinking something totally weird so I'd have to start again. After a couple of hours of this I was really seriously wondering just what goes on inside my brain that my conscious self has no inkling of.

I mean, I caught my brain wondering why potatoes come in so many different types and if those types all taste just a little bit different. And who was it anyway who decided that a potato was a food that could be cooked and eaten. Who was it decided cooking was a great idea and who came up with different food combinations? Back to the beginning again, 1 2 3....

I can't remember all of the strange things my brain considered in those three hours, I'm just recounting to you now the ones I can remember. Sadly, the more bizarre thoughts that made me go 'ARE YOU SERIOUS MIND???' have vanished with the morning light and all that is left are the more normal ones, such as a green and black caterpillar climbing up a plant (in my imagination) and I wondered why it was decided that caterpillars should exist anyway. Of course they are food for birds - but which bird first looked at a caterpillar and decided it looked good to eat.

It wasn't all questions though. I had the usual money worries, worries about where I will be in a year's time, all those things. But in between were all these weird thoughts - pieces of the sky turning into butterflies, a sudden failure of gravity and everything floating which in turn caused agonising about which things would float higher without gravity or would they all float at the same height in which case it would get very crowded. How long would it take for this town to be reclaimed by the desert if it was abandoned. If I planted a bougainvillea at the base of this apartment building would it eventually climb up to my balcony on the fifth floor and if it did would its branches be strong enough for me to climb down on - and just how did the writer of Jack and the Beanstalk ever come up with that idea, was he drunk every day for a year?

By the end I was actually imagining my mind finding dusty tunnels - I was picturing my thoughts inside my mind exploring twists and turns of brain matter and beginning to seriously doubt my sanity. In case you want to know what this looked like, it was a miniature brain rolling through dull yellow tunnels of brain matter and finding random thoughts tucked away in pockets on the walls which it plucked out with little blood vessel hands. The lighting was very dim inside my brain which seemed appropriate as I think my brain power was on extremely dim wattage.

At this point I had been lying awake for three hours, and decided it was time to play hardball with my brain. I started counting in earnest, colouring each number in rainbow colours and spelling it inside my head and picturing the background to each number. Anything to stop the random thoughts. Finally it worked, or perhaps exhaustion got to me and I slept.

When I woke this morning I still had the thought, where does the brain go and what does it think when we are not actively using it? Dreams come from the subconscious which is always active and apparently quite strange. I know when I write it comes from somewhere I am not exactly connected to. I never know what I'm going to write until I see it on the screen. My fingers just move and my mind is still. The only mental activity I am aware of is the script of words scrolling across my eyes.

That's kind of weird all on its own. Writing is a creative process and yet I don't consciously connect to that part of my brain that produces what I write. Do other writers experience this? Is it the same with artists and sculptors and any other sort of creative person? Or is it just me, is there a tiny other me living in my brain that controls that creative part and it goes kicking around the dusty brain corridors looking for ideas?  Or is there some being that is sucking out the electrical energy my brain produces when I write and that's why I get so tired after writing for several hours without a break? It's at this stage of my thoughts, lying in bed this morning, that I decided it was getting a little bit Stephen King and perhaps I should stop thinking about it.

So I am quite possibly losing my mind, or maybe its the effect of sleep deprivation. I'm seriously considering taking an Antinal tonight, not because I have a stomach upset - I've pretty much adjusted to the food here - but because one of the effects of Antinal is that it puts you to sleep. I'd like to sleep the night through, I really would...

Where is the 'zen' in zentangle???

Probably it's just me, most likely it's just me. I have such problems with everything that's supposed to soothe and calm and relax a person. Meditation? Well you all know how that goes for me and there's not a lot of meditation in it.

Listening to music? Well that is relaxing to a point, but if I listen to whale song or waves on a beach it soon irritates me and there's very little zen in that. If I listen to classical music that is soothing as well, until I try to pick out each individual group of instruments - was that the flutes? Did I hear the trombone there? Then I start to try to listen to each individual part played by each individual group of instruments and then try to pick out the different melody played by the same instruments within the piece all AT THE SAME TIME and that's decidedly not relaxing.

Go for a walk, that's relaxing and it is, it really is. Until I start timing myself and try to beat myself each day. Great for fitness, not so good for relaxing. Needlework, well that is relaxing, I love to do cross-stitch and tapestry. One of my sorrows is losing all but one piece of my work in the floods a few years ago. The only problem I have with needlework is that it tends to take over my life and I do it to the exclusion of everything else. Then I get the guilts about not doing other things I should be doing. Moderation? What's that??

So zentangling, it looked like the ideal thing to do, a small square, not too much time involved and a satisfying result. And it is. Well it is if you do it the way I believe you're supposed to do it. I believe the idea is one square at a time, learn the different patterns and then let the pen wander as it will over the paper. But of course me, I spend all day working on it, trying to learn all the patterns at once, doing square after square and then trying to make a collage effect from them all, so that each square has to be pre-planned to make it work.

Without scissors (remember, glued them shut in a stroke of genius) I've become used to using an A4 size sheet divided up into 9 squares, until I decided that sometimes maybe it should be two or four squares, exactly in the middle of course and with a large framework of zentangling around it. Lots of measuring and swearing by me - can't draw a straight line to save my life so have to use a ruler and do lots and lots of measurements to get my lines straight. Supreme lack of zen.

So the zentangling has been put in the cupboard. I will do it of course, I have already got two new pages ruled up after all and it really is addictive. But since I can't trust myself to do only a little bit and then move onto something else, it will wait there until I finish the work I have set myself with Zora's Dawn.

Where is the zen then? I added the 'then' only because I like the sound it makes, zen then... The only place I find zen is when I write. And now that I am trying to make a living from it I don't need to get the guilts if I do it all day and get up in the pre-dawn to do something that came to me in a dream. Writing does everything that everything else is supposed to do. I focus on it, lose myself in it, forget the rest of the world while I'm doing it. I'm calm (except when it's not going so well), relaxed and my mind is not spinning.The words still scroll along on their script inside my head but it's only the words I'm writing and the rest of them disappear for a while. I am in fact living exactly in the 'now' and that's the zen.

I really loved writing the various cat books, so much so that I have almost finished another and have yet another one in my head. They are very satisfying for a couple of reasons. One is that they only take a week to write and publish because they are short reads. The other is that I am writing about a subject that I really love - cats - and so it gives me a lot of pleasure to write about them. And geek that I am I love to do research so I find the entire experience a great deal of fun.

But Zora's Dawn is waiting and growing impatient. Last night I dreamt I was sitting in a cafe and the person at the table next to me turned so their face was in profile and it was a wolf face. So time to get on with that too. I have a plan, so that I can do both types of writing. Zora's Dawn needs to be finished and the editing well under way in a couple of weeks, as a person I need to interview about the shelter book will be available next month. Once I've talked to her and two other people it will be time to put that book together.

So, I will write my fun writing for part of the day, and work on Zora's Dawn the rest of the time. There's only about 5000 words to do to finish Zora's Dawn but they are the hardest since I know where she has to be at the end of the book (to lead properly into the next in the series which is already planned out in my head) but I'm not quite sure how to get her there!

And of course I have to overcome the paralysing procrastination. Once the book is finished I have to put it out there, and if it fails it will be quite a devastating experience so of course I'm procrastinating with all the skill a lifetime of doing so has given me.

So, I am off to read, edit and write :)