So yes, I’m at that age when sleep can be elusive, in ways that were foreign just a few months ago. Something makes me swiftly surface from what used to be a nice, quiet, unconscious night and I lie...awake. For a while. Sometimes a long while.

It is unbidden time, aka, time I wish were spent in another way. But instead of triggering my inner control freak and sheet plucker, sometimes, just sometimes, I find myself treating these gaps in rest as prayer. I, who too seldom make time for prayer, make the space to think about God...well, here is space handed to me. It’s a gap -- and it invites conscious prayers of awareness, of attunement, even of gratitude, if I can just be in the space and listen. Sometimes I find myself reveling in the silence.

It's time when I can just stop and be -- however unwillingly. And I recognize that it would be good to cultivate this practice during waking hours! Yes....

Two other thoughts: I think of the last chapter of the Gospel of John, chapter 21, verse 18, when Jesus says to the disciples, "The truth is, when you were young, you were able to do as you liked and go wherever you wanted to. But when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and others will direct you and take you where you don’t want to go."

My nightly gaps are but one manifestation of the ways we all are taken into spaces that are not of our choosing. Sometimes those voyages are entrances into new life; sometimes they are pretty bleak. A wakeful night is but one very tiny curve ball compared to others you, male or female, know something about.

Second thought: My hunch is that wakefulness is at the heart of the matter, whether the sleep-related one I am writing about, or the kind that comes from other focusing, life-changing experiences. The key is to not revert back to a former state. As the Sufi mystic Rumi poem says, "Don’t go back to sleep!"

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. 
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want. 
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth
across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
Translated by Coleman Barks

Sweet summer dreams -- and wakefulness -- to you all.