no one cuddles up to the alarm

I mean do you? While it’s actively “alarming”, do you snuggle in close to its blare? More likely you slam your hand over the snooze button or jam it under your pillow. You have it, you need it, but I doubt you love it.

The alarm.

The thing that wakes you out of dreams and yanks you from your comfort under the comforter. Your denial under your doona. Your divorce from “the real world” hiding out under your duvet. The alarm pulls you away from your lover, if you’re lucky enough to have a critter to cling close to, human or other-wise.

I mean I sincerely hope you love and cuddle your loves more than you do your alarm.

Or maybe you don’t need an alarm. You have a natural rhythm of awakening with the light, aligned to circadian currents. That’s ideal in my books. One of my elders rises around 3:30am and sometimes he would call me around dawn (having been up for hours) and say, with a warm smile in his voice,

Are you rising and shining!?!

But that’s unusual. Most of us require electronics to rouse from slumber. Most of us are not trained to greet, gratefully, the rising of the sun, as we like to call the spinning of the Earth that brings our place on it to face the sun again. Hunh, maybe this self-centric view that thinks the sun rotates around us, rising into view, is part of the problem…

We have baked into our beings a certain resistance to the alarm. Simultaneous to a certain training by the wider culture to pay attention to, and make room for, the sirens. Except that, these days, with so many of them, who notices anymore? Maybe if you’re on the road you’ll pull over to let the vehicle move through faster, but otherwise it’s often background noise. And have you noticed how the lights and the loudness have increased over the years, to compete with all the other increases?

Do we love them all the more for it? Do we thank them for doing the honest job we asked them to do?!

My point is I often feel like the alarm.

I get it, and I’m getting used to it. I probably ventured into stand-up comedy instinctively, as a way to strengthen my ability to abide being balked at, even booed. Metaphorically slammed down.

For, alarms are like dogs.

They don’t take your tantrum personally. And they don’t let it stop them doing their best by you.

Though of course it could just be that I’m not very funny! Would alarms work if they woke you with a joke? Laughing ourselves awake would be so much better. What will it take to wake up laughing?

Here’s a start. My alarm has lost its second hand. The seconds are rattling around. Not a second to lose! On the Doomsday Clock we have 90 seconds to implosion time, but my clock says, ‘In fact, my friend, there are no seconds left!'

What will it take for us to actually wake up? Doomsday clocks, sirens, alarms, people screeching on about it all — is any of it audible through all the other noise and amidst the daily dose of “getting by”?

I still struggle to submit my assignments in time, to show up on time, to keep consistent time. So while I may sounds righteous, I’m not. For years I’ve resisted going deep into all these gory details of the damage we’ve done to living beings. I’m literally paying a university to make me look closely, and even so I’m still dragging my feet. In fact, I’m writing this to avoid writing (and weeping) about the threats to the gentle dugongs and their seagrass habitat.

So I fully, totally, understand the resistance. Everyone has their own journey and their own timing. It is what it is. And what it is, is rugged. The “real world” out there is dire. Forgive me if I have less and less time for entertainment and distraction. My clock is saying, No seconds left!

SO, time to rise and shine y’all!

Evolve, illuminate, enlighten, and right quick! Bring on the brilliance and the brimming over for biota, for all living beings, which, in my books, includes what many call abiotic—water, rocks, minerals…

No time left to play war games. We got some hardcore loss on loving to make up for.

All that energy we have, now that we have a handle on our own wellness, let’s pay it forward my friend.