30  96%  30%  omph WSW bar 29.85 rises windchill30  Winter

                     New Moon

At 2 AM this morning I finished Ken Follett’s, Triple.  Don’t know whether it was Turkish tea, an unusually large meal or envy over the traveling and work related adventures of my fellow Woollys, but I couldn’t get to sleep last night and woke up at 6 AM today.  I hope it’s not envy, the other two I can handle.  Envy is a monster that makes you miserable through a combination of self-flagellation and jealousy.  Each time I feel I’ve wrestled the demon ambition back into the pit from which He springs, it seems instead I’ve wound the crank on a jack in the box.  Or not.

Could be I’m feeling this way because I’m tired, lost sleep and can’t decide why.  In fact, as I write this, as often happens, the words provide their own catharis.  I’m happy for Mark, Paul and Stefan, not envious.  They make me proud to be a Woolly and their friend.  I’ve chosen a different path for my later life, one with its own benefits and downsides, not a worse one. 

Just occurred to me the Jacob at the Jabbok ford nature of the demon wrestling metaphor.  We may wrestle demons as well as angels and to equal affect.  If we hold a demon at the ford, we prevent them from crossing over into our spiritual lives; we keep them on their side of the river.  There is no reason to believe, either, that we will only have one match in a lifetime.  If history serves, we will all stand at the Jabbok ford many times in our lives, arms wrapped round one adversary or another, devil or angel. 

Had a strange dream last night. 

I was in charge of a storage room in a hospital.  It had shelf after shelf of boxes, equipment, various light bulbs all of which were there when I came to the job.  At some point I left the room, maybe to go home for the day, and returned to find it turned into an employee lounge.  When I asked where all the stuff went, I was led into a small laboratory where one row of three shelves held the pared down contents of the room. 

Deflated, I asked if I still had a job.

Oh, yes.

A tub of silverware appeared in my hands. 

I carried it through the hospital to the kitchen area, through two automatic doors only to discover when I got to the dishwasher that the tub was empty.  When I tracked back, looking for the silverware, a woman I knew came up to me and said I had dumped it in the wastebasket of a woman’s hospital room.  Sheepish, I went to the room and retrieved the silverware. To make sure I got it all, I flipped on the light and the woman in the hospital bed said, “Can’t you see I’m sick?”

I turned off the light and got out of the room as quickly as possible.