Sleeplessness

 

Since my private Tsunami my sleep is mega-bad. I am healthy (everything was checked with stunning good results, only my melatonin level was very low, as I had suspected - now that is ok too), I eat well, move a lot, am optimistic, thankful and financially secure, have many friends and the Flying Dutchman, and call myself happy. 

So why do I sleep so very bad? I fall easily asleep (I established a routine), then I sleep till 3:30 or four o'clock a.m. (round about) - then I wake up, pulse racing, and my mind starts to rattle, about things that look like piffle in the morning. And that I know at night too - yet I can't stop.(That cock in Bavaria either, and the dear sun tries without success to peek around the very, very darkening curtains).   

No sleeping pills for me, there I am adamant. My flawed way to cope: 

I go to the kitchen (in the dark), heat a cup of milk and add some honey, (I am convinced that my blood-sugar dives when I am asleep - maybe that wakes me up? I do not have diabetes), then I walk back, lie down - and the CD-player above starts to play his role as knight in shining armour. 

I put the ear-plugs in and listen to the soothing voice of a German actress, for half an hour she is speaking a meditation, I listen, slack...and if I am lucky, often doze away. Otherwise I have done a very fine meditation - but am tired the next day. 

 

Now I test naps at midday (together with that meditation). I am still not sure if that helps.  

What do you do when you can't sleep? 

Any suggestions? 

(Our Grandmothers cross-stitched a German proverb on pillows: 

"A clean conscience / makes a fine pillow" - but THAT I have, honestly.) 

  

My Cup of Tea (Little Stories of Your Life)

 

There are two favourites - and that tells a lot about me: very often between two extremes. 

The cup which I use most often is a mug. Relaxing cream white bone china, Wedgwood. Snagged from a discontinued line in the classy porcelain shop Lindemann in Hildesheim - a shop with intimidating older salespersons, clad in black, and the shop now closed long ago. (Do you know that prices for valuable porcelain as Meissen or KPM crashed deeper than many stocks now?)

As often I didn't buy as much as I "should" have bought - I had just become a young mother, and we had bought the huge Art Deco villa, thus money was scarce and I thought well before spending it.  

I only bought four mugs and added two round teacups with saucers (one long called from this mortal life, and I don't know whether the shards brought me luck, as a German proverbs promises). Those cups are in my Berlin apartment, the four mugs are justly divided between Berlin and Bavaria. 

The mugs feel so wonderful in my hands - glossy and unexcited, and you can trust them to keep the soothingly warmth for a long time in their bone(s) china. 

The tea I mix myself - but that is a different story. 

And that of the second favourite cup too. 

 I just bought this book and might follow its interesting suggestions.                                          

Query: are you content with this font? I like it because it looks as if I have written a letter to you - but maybe it is difficult to read?