Sleep and Gyroscopes

Image from google search - source lost, background removed

I can’t sleep.

That’s not unusual, and there’s many reasons… tonight’s an interesting combination. I’m a human barometer, marked in vaguely estimated kilopascals and a meticulously graduated pain scale; unstable weather hurts. That’s not conducive to sleeping well. Between both, I’m not exactly a bundle of activity. Sometimes I get so tired of being tired, though. So, I could take some valerian and I probably will soon, but meanwhile, I don’t have to be anywhere for a few days, so I’m letting myself enjoy the relative silence and see what I can do with what’s in my head.

Mostly, I’m still discombobulated, though differently than through the chaos of the past while. Now, it’s like the inner workings of the gyroscope are reorienting in response to a directional change in the outer layers. I have a home, and am slowly readjusting to that and connected layers of life like health and medical care, and other internal layers.

According to some articles I’ve seen (and lost, but they’re out and about on the internet), Earth is doing that as well. Like a spinning top, the core eventually slows down. Planets having rather more momentum than toys, they don’t stop; they slowly reverse direction. It seems the Earth’s core has slowed to the point where it will imminently change direction. Apparently this happens relatively frequently in terms of the lifespan of a planet, and is no cause for alarm. It’s interesting, though… so many of us are doing a similar dance these days, solos and ensembles and troupes, connected like the cogs and wheels of a gyroscope., recalibrating in accordance with the patterns of physics, and in response to the world around it.

Many of my friends are refinding their directions in response to changes.

So are groups, organizations, businesses, politicians - even industries are starting to shift.

North American Indigenous peoples are recalibrating in response to environmental and human rights crimes.

Thousands of people in Peru are surging in new directions in response to related pressures.

The environmental issues and crimes spurring much indigenous response and rightful outrage around the world are causing disastrous changes in the global ecosystem, to which the entire livable surface of planet, and much more of it than that, are responding.

Human rights, and the right s of life other than humanity, are gaining speed. Creatures including cephalopods are being lagally and politically recognized as sentient beings. Trees, land, and rivers are being granted recognized as entities and granted ‘personhood’. Ecocide law is becoming a very real thing. The Earth herself might – and should – be similarly respected.

We’re hotboxing the coldframed garden of our planet, and it’s desperately allergic to the toxins.

The damage is destroying the atmosphere, while the continental plates are shifting significantly in response to redistribution of weight due to massive thawing,.

Comets are buzzing this planet fascinatingly close (but the volatile weather hasn’t let me see any of these phenomena).

According to astronomers, Earth may be closer to a significant black hole than previously thought… and while that timeframe of those patterns operate on such and immense scale that this Earth may have reincarnated herself a few times before it becomes a threat, it does make our movement through space slightly quicker. It affects all the cogs and wheels of the galaxies, including ours, and so it affects our solar system and our planet.

And that affects our individual lives and equilibrium.

It’s like one of those film clips beginning with a tiny particular spot and zooming out farther and farther and then swooping back in again, showing the fractal patterns of the universal gyroscope.

We need to pull the wrenches out of the works.

It doesn’t matter who threw them, what size they are, where they came from, or where they ideally ought to be. It certainly doesn’t matter what brand or material they are or what colour the packaging is. Just get them out. They’re fucking up our own lives, and our friends lives, and the world. If you can take one small wrench out of the works, you’ve changed the whole gyroscope. If we can pull a few more out, beautiful. We can work on bigger wrenches together. Those changes affect the larger cogs and wheels, and they have to change direction, and so on, and so on… and the gyroscope reorients and rebalances. Some parts may no longer be necessary. Some may be too broken to function. Some may have fallen out. But this is a metaphor anyways, and it’s about growing, so the gyroscope adapts. It continues. Life, in some form, continues, and life itself is a creative force, and that is reason to shed the rust and wrenches, and keep doing what it takes to keep our balance.

Including, sometimes, sleep.

Handwrenches, by Industrial Designer Paul Julius Martus