Róisín Ingle: I can’t sleep, jolted awake at 3.30am

“Things! Burn them, burn them!”

That’s what the American poet Mary Oliver advises in her poem Storage. I’ve not been sleeping well lately. Instead I am jolted awake by some unknown force at 3.30am or 4am. My friend said it might be the recent full moon, but I don’t know about that.

Sometimes when I can’t sleep I’ve taken to reading poetry, hoping it might invite calm. I search for soothing words on my phone, which I thoughtfully put into night mode so I don’t disturb the gently snoring, deeply sleeping person beside me, who I try and fail not to resent.

When I can’t sleep and I don’t feel like poetry I lie in the gloom and think about all the stuff in my house. (“Things! Burn them, burn them!”) About the lack of storage, which is not really the problem. About the large chest of drawers in what has become our home office. Why, I wonder at 4.30am, do we have a chest of drawers in an office? A chest of drawers filled with towels and bed linen. I think about it until sleep comes, if it comes, and then when the dawn light creeps around the sides of the bedroom blind I put it to the back of my mind, like an old towel with frayed edges at the back of a drawer that’s in the wrong room.

‘I am 35 and I can’t marry. Who would accept me? I have nothing’

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The question 'What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?' sort of cracked me open. And then the crack healed or wore off

I don’t think by “Things!” Mary Oliver meant sheets or towels necessarily. I think she meant all the extraneous stuff. I have a shelf of video tapes I can’t get rid of. And there is another shelf of cassette tapes. I don’t know what I am doing holding on to these artefacts from another era. The video tapes are of movies I love, like The Sound of Music and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I don’t need them any more. I can find them easily on some streaming platform or other. But I hold on to them. And I think about them in the middle of the night.

Mary Oliver is a poet I first heard about years ago in India, sitting in a room with dozens of others in Bodh Gaya, the place in Bihar where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. A wise woman called Jaya asked us all something Oliver had asked in her poem.

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?"

Back then, this question sort of cracked me open. And then the crack healed or wore off. Nothing is ever as profound again as the very first time you hear the profound thing spoken out loud in a room where people have been meditating all day.

I’ve heard this question asked so many times on radio and in articles since that moment when I was temporarily cracked open in India. The wild and precious life question has become a sort of cliche. It’s not Mary Oliver’s fault. More than 30 years ago she wrote something so simple and yet so profound that it began popping up everywhere, and it has lost, for me anyway, something of its potency.

I lie awake and think about the moon. I read on a sleep website – since the pandemic sleep websites seem to have multiplied like a virus – that some people believe the phases of the moon influence menstrual cycles and fertility. “If this is true, then it’s reasonable to conceive a mechanism by which the moon impacts sleep by acting on female hormones.” I lie awake and think about the menopause. The moonopause. My face grows warm and sweaty, but sleep does not come.

One day, my youngest sister, Katie, comes around for lunch. I’m too tired to make anything, so I order sushi. I tell her about my first-world problems. The incongruous chest of drawers in the office. The equally out-of-place sideboard in the office that in the lockdowns served as a pandemic pantry. There are baked beans and towels in my place of work. I tell her about the book mountains all over the house and the videotapes. “I need some help,” I say. They are magic words. We should all say them more often.

Mary Oliver's poem Storage is about how getting rid of stuff can make more room and not just in your house. It's about the lifting of existential burdens

A few days later she arrives with giant bags for stuff to get rid of and boxes with lids for stuff to keep. The decluttering guru Marie Kondo has been in my house trying to help me before – this is a true fact, not some kind of insomniacal fever dream – but Katie goes at my house like a turbocharged Marie Kondo with bells on. In two hours, three rooms in my house are transformed and the boot of her car is filled with nine bags for the charity shop.

“Well done,” she says to me through the two hours as though I am a small child getting a gold star. I reluctantly hand over video tapes and books I thought I’d keep forever. “You’re doing great.”

Mary Oliver's poem Storage is about how getting rid of stuff can make more room, and not just in your house. It's about the lifting of existential burdens. I think about this as I lie awake at 4.45am. The chest of drawers is in the bedroom now and the sideboard is downstairs beside the sofa in a newly created space for relaxation. With nine huge bags of stuff gone there is more room, just as Oliver predicted.

"More room in your heart for love,
for the trees! For the birds who own
nothing – the reason they can fly."

The birds who own nothing sleep well too. Heads tucked into wings. I think about them and wait for sleep to come.

roisin@irishtimes.com