Laying down

I have always been an active person, I have always done sport. I have always kept busy; reading, writing, working, studying, playing. All at the same time, a combination of a few and of many, even on just one thing intensely at a time, even though saying that, the sport has never stopped. If I can fit the whole damn lot in then I will.

But there is one thing that goes upstream against the flow. Laying down. I love laying down.

Take my sofa for instance. It's not very often that I sit up on it; apart from when there are others on it, it is maybe only when I'm drinking something. I usually lay on it. I can slouch with my feet on the coffee table, but that is just a staggered movement towards the inevitable. Besides, I would spill what I'm drinking if I was laying down.

On the beach I play volleyball and beach tennis, I go running down it and go in and out the sea. But I just love laying on it on a Sunday like a beached whale.

Just to lay in a field and look up at the sky and watch the clouds drift or stare in to a hard blue nothing, I don't know how many times I've done that.

Then of course there is the bed. Oh boy I just love that, a nice big one. I just did that this morning - I layed there for half an hour in my duveyed and crisp, white cotton oasis doing nothing before I even contemplated getting up. I love that feeling you have when you wake up after a good night's sleep. And of course, if you have company in there...well, in this case I don't know one person who would not like laying down in there...not that it would be as lazy...saying that, you can also lay down anywhere to do that...actively laying down ;-)

My very first memory is from laying down. I was three-years old and I had a plastic toy tractor I could sit and ride on. In our back garden in the first house I ever lived in, we had a decline, a kind of slope after a flat followed by another flat bit. Without a care in the world I would take a run up on the first flat bit of lawn and almost plummet down the slope (hey, for a three-year old that looked like a cliff) and crash and fall off at the bottom of it. That was the scope of it really, over and over again. This was possibly my introduction to my love of mud and the catalyst to days at school coming home covered in it after playground time. Maybe I should have been a hippo in a past life, but that's a different story. The mud that is, not the hippo.

So...

One time I went on my usual tractor blazing run-up and hurtle down the slope and crashed like always. Though this time I remember laying on my back and looking up at a late afternoon, blue summer sky and seeing the moon. You know, when you can already see it all whispy in the daylight. Moreso, I could see the man in the moon. I could see his face looking back down at me. And then I can remember running back in the house crying because he was staring at me like that.

Since then, every time I look at the moon, I can see the man in there. At night I can see that face in that round head beaming bright in the sky as clear as day. Every time, without fail, I see him always. Now he makes me smile, seeing him in the sky on a clear night is one of the things in this world you cannot fail to like. His beaming face looks down on the world as if to say 'yeah, don't worry, things are cool'.

Funnily enough I am sitting up straight in a chair as I write this on my lap top. I can't write laying down. But I am my own contradiciton. Though I am going to lay down on the sofa after I finish here and zap through some Sunday night TV. Then I read. Laying down of course.

Lay down with me. It's easy to dream like that. And we all need to dream just like we all need to lay down sooner or later in the day. Dreaming is a process that moves us, moves us on and even makes us progress. I have a dream. It's the time thing come to us, we don't go to our dreams. Keep it real, but don't stop dreaming.

By the way, can you see the man in the moon too?