A Creature in the Night

Dear all,

Happy Friday! We are readying for Welcome Week with bare a whisker's breath since the Festivals vacated the building.

Here's what I'll be offering this semester, starting up on the other side of the weekend (scroll down if you just want to read about Hope...), with all details on our website and some flyers attached. 

Mindfulness Course for Students

- runs Wednesdays 30th September to 25^th November

- skill-building course suitable for beginners, as well as those with some meditation experience

- 'really enjoyed it, would recommend to others interested in improving their mental state' - say participants

- a friendly group with tailored support over 8 weeks

Mindfulness Lunch-time Drop-in sessions

- open to all UoE students, staff, and alums

- Welcome Week sessions run 1-2pm, thereafter 1.10-1.50pm

- Monday and Friday on-site at the Chaplaincy, Bristo Square, upstairs in Room 2

- Tuesday online on Teams

- consist of a check-in, 25 min practice, and reflection or quiet time

- compassion and befriending practices (Mondays) and grounding practices (Fridays) (Tuesdays will vary)

- no need to book - just show up

For PGRs

- Mindfulness for PhD Students workshop, Wednesday Welcome Week, 3-4.30pm, on-site in the Chaplaincy, upstairs in Room 2

- PhD Book Club starts Friday Welcome Week, 3.30-4.45pm, on-site in the Chaplaincy. Runs every 6 weeks, throughout the year. Email kitty.wheater@ed.ac.uk to register. 

- Mindfulness Course for Staff and PGRs, starts Friday October 2^nd for 9 weeks

For staff

- Mindfulness Course for Staff and PGRs, starts Friday October 2^nd for 9 weeks

- Student Support & Wellbeing Journal Club, hybrid, for all staff in student support/experience roles, and interested others

- The Village, quarterly in-person reflective forum to think about university culture, purpose, and future. Email kitty.wheater@ed.ac.uk to join mail-list

I'm looking forward to seeing many of you in the weeks ahead. As always, if you have any questions, just hit reply. 

For this week's MindLetter, an interrupted night's sleep...

A Creature in the Night

Night: a deserted thoroughfare, the rich deep velvet of a black sky speckled with stars, the cocoon of a carefully-arranged nest, the heaviness of a warm duvet, the curve of the right pillow in the right place, the well of somnolence that takes you all the way down into the mysterious heart of sleep. For human beings, the night is our humblest time, bringing us back to earth from lofty daytime contrails. It is at this time that our nominally invincible species acknowledges its animality, vulnerability, need to recoup and restore alongside all the other creatures we purport to rule. Even dreams require our surrender, for they are the jetsam and flotsam of our fragmented days made orderly, quietly put away by a force of brain still beyond our ken. Sleep is essential, worth honouring. There has to be a good reason for its interruption.

There certainly has to be a good reason to interrupt mine. For the four and a half years that Hope has been my border collie, we have had the following deal: she wakes me in the night if, and only if, there is an impending canine bowel- or bladder-related catastrophe requiring immediate attention. This contract has served us well. She jumps on me in the wee hours, and I (more-or-less) cheerfully toss away the duvet, pull on the red joggers, pocket the headtorch, and wander out into the night – dark or cold, warm or wet – in the knowledge that after this thirteen-to-fifteen-minute interlude I will slide back into my slot in the nest, the cocoon, the well of somnolence, and it will still be warm. She’s ecstatic with thanks, and I drift back to sleep with the feeling of a job well done. Everybody wins.

Bookmark that picture for a moment. Now imagine this: treason. It began with dry dog food, which, around ten days ago, I saw scattered on the lawn. I assumed a neighbour – perhaps the little boys, or the woman who loves the German Shepherd – had taken to leaving treats out for Hope. This was awkward, because Hope gains weight easily, and new food upsets her stomach. So I messaged the neighbours, all of whom denied it, and ignored the food, which disappeared anyway, straight into the bellies of the crows and gulls. I assumed that was that. I did not think that the dry dog food had any implications whatsoever for my night-time covenant with my dog.

Now imagine that it is two thirty in the morning on a Sunday night, and Hope jumps on the bed. Thump. What does a woman do? Switch on the lamp, murmuring sympathies, clothe self adequately, get out the front door. The night is dark, moths fluttering towards our light. Hope trots ahead of me; I note that there is – how can I put this? – a distinct lack of urgency in her pace. Usually in such circumstances it is a hell-for-leather scramble towards the prospect of relief. This time, Hope does her business like it's a casual ten a.m. pitstop. I clock this, but shrug it off. I trust the contract.

Half an hour later I am thumped again. This must be a bad night – but sometimes it happens. As Hope and I stumble outside I am not really there; I am still in bed, snoozing in my cocoon. I am James Herriot in the 1930s, dragged from slumber by the ringing of the telephone in the Yorkshire Dales, delivering a calf in the middle of the fells or administering an injection to a whelping hound on the other side of town, all while studiously half-asleep. Hope wanders and sniffs for a few minutes. Then, suddenly alert, she dashes up the path and round the corner faster than I can keep up. Perhaps it was a cat; Hope, when I get to her, is empty-jawed, and all riled up. I am annoyed. The hunt has distracted her from the impending bowel-or-bladder-situation that is the only reason I am out of bed. All she can think about right now is cats. There’s nothing for it but to go back inside.

The third time, it’s a couple of jumps – sixteen kilos of dog landing in the small of my back each time – before I am roused. Once up I am back on autopilot, a well-oiled dog-owning covenant-honouring machine. I had left the socks and joggers poised by the side of the bed; I don’t even need to think about how many jumpers I need. On it goes, and as I lurch down the stairs – she’s already at the bottom, that elegant clatter and tumble on four paws travelling exponentially faster than my two – the thought occurs to me for the first time that my dog might be taking the mick.

Would she? Could she? Is tonight not what I think it is? I believe I am responding to my beloved dog’s urgent cry, the tacit ethics of life lived in human-hound ecology, but is there something small and terrible happening here – a process, sneaking, dogged, unwitting on my part, whereby she is learning something new, something that fundamentally threatens our four-and-a-half-year old agreement, forged in the trenches of human vulnerability and trust: is she rousing me in the middle of the night simply for the hell of it? Surely not.

The fourth time, I go because I feel guilty. How could I doubt her, after all that we’ve been through? But somewhere between the Mexican orange and the pyracantha, cold clarity punches me in the gut. For the first time in all our days and nights together, Hope has dragged me from my essential earth-bound life-restoring sleep simply because the prospect of chasing a cat/deer/fox/squirrel was more important than the deal she had with me.

I am seething with the betrayal, but it is better to face the treachery than to be a mug. I test my new hypothesis by withstanding the six or seven jumps that come my way over the following half hour (that’s over a hundred kilos of dog). No emissions-related catastrophe ensues. Eventually, we sleep – both of us.

The next day, at twilight, I see a beautiful fox slipping nonchalantly over the lawn, red-gold, bushy-tailed. The morning after, there is a new pile of scat on the path. A brief examination reveals that the fox is eating hawthorn berries, small plums, seedheads. It takes a couple of days for my brain to get there, taxed by its night on the doggy-double-dealing town, but then comprehension descends: the dry dog food was not for Hope at all, but for the Reynard slinking by the bushes, the creature wandering the night. And Hope was chasing its tail. 

Can I deny, at my dog's perfidy, the smallest twinge of respect? That when opportunity arose, a new canine cognition sparked into existence, a putting together of goal and method, an aliveness to the moment so acute that years of honour went out the window, all to answer a primeval calling, an epoch-ancient, vein-thrilling battle-cry that beats like a drum in the chest of wild creatures. This, and only this, is the reason I will get up the next time Hope jumps on the bed in the middle of the night: because such a creature is worth waking for, one more time.

May you and yours sleep soundly this weekend.

Warmly,

Kitty