← Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Ama's Loom - A Story of the Weather of a Life
00:39:03
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, it's Eric. Before we begin tonight's episode, just a quick reminder. You're about to hear a few ads that help to support Listen to Sleep. If you'd rather drift off without them, you can join Listen to Sleep plus and get every episode ad free plus bonus stories and meditations. Just go to ListenToSleep.com and click on Support to learn more.
- [00:29]
B
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- [00:39]
C
Learn more@chase.com SapphireServe cards issued by JP Morgan, Chase bank and a member FDIC subject to credit approval Disordered eating messaging is all around us. You can hardly leave your house or check your phone without seeing something about dieting, weight loss or exercise. We with all that pressure, it can be hard to recognize habits have become harmful or even an eating disorder. If you're concerned you or a loved one might have an eating disorder, I want to introduce you to Equip. Equip is a fully virtual evidence based eating disorder treatment program that helps patients achieve lasting recovery at home. Every Equip patient is matched with a multidisciplinary care team that includes a therapist, dietitian, medical provider and mentors. And you get a personalized treatment plan that's tailored to your unique meet goals and challenges. Equip treats patients of all ages and all eating disorder diagnoses. It's covered by insurance and there's no wait list. If you think that you or a loved one could be struggling with an eating disorder, don't wait to get help. Visit Equip Health to learn more. That's Equip Health.
- [01:47]
A
This episode is brought to you by Amantara. So I want to tell you about something I tried recently and really liked. It's a mushroom called Amanita muscaria that people have been using for centuries and it's quietly finding its way into people's lives. Right now. The way folks describe it is just calm, clear headed like the edges soften a little. Amantara is one of the leading importers of this mushroom into the us sourcing it from remote regions of Eastern Europe, working directly with small family harvesters and doing the actual lab testing that many companies just skip. A lot of people are using it as an alternative to a glass of wine at the end of the day, something to unwind with that doesn't come with the morning after wait. If you're curious and I think you will be head to amantara.com that's a M E N T A R-A dot com to explore their full lineup. Hello friends, it's Eric. Welcome back to Listen to Sleep, where ancient wisdom meets deep Rest Spring is the season that reminds me that everything that went dark and cold and still over winter the ground, the trees, the light turns out to have been working all along. Roots were going down, seeds were resting. What looked like an ending was simply the long preparation for something that needed time to become itself. Tonight's story lives in that truth. It's about a woman named Amma who has been weaving the weather of the world since before the first morning, and a young woman named Mira who arrives at her door carrying the particular exhaustion of a life not yet understood. It is a story about why the hard times in life are not mistakes, about loss and grief and confusion as the very material from which something is being made, even now, even when we cannot see it. Before we begin. Can I ask you a favor? If you've read my book Awaken youn Myth, could you leave an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads? It helps so much to get the book into the hands of the folks it'll help most. And if you haven't read it and you'd like to find more peace and purpose in your life, I wrote it for you. It's full of stories and tools that took me a lifetime to learn and over 3 years to write. And it includes everything that helped me see through my own story to know more deeply who and what I am. It's not about self help or spirituality, it's self revelation through the modern science of mindfulness and the ancient wisdom of myths. You can find links to buy and review it in the show Notes. Thank you so much for your support with this. It means a lot to me. You let's take a deep breath in and out. Just letting go of the day, feeling the weight of gravity pulling you deep down into the mattress. Another deep breath and out. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be. This is your time. Quiet time. One more deep breath in and out. If you get tired while I'm reading to you, that is okay. Just let yourself drift off. Amma's loom before the first morning found its way across the sky, before rivers had decided which way to run, there was a woman who lived at the edge of what was known, not at the edge of the world. The world had no edges then, and perhaps it still does not. But there is a place felt more than Found where the known thins out like wood smoke, where certainty loosens its grip and something older begins. She lived there. She had always lived there. Her name was Amma. No one remembered who had given her that name, or whether she had given it to herself. Or maybe it had simply arrived one morning with the fog and stayed. It did not matter. Names are small things, and Amma was not a small thing. Her home was low and warm, set into the hillside the way a stone settles into the bed of a stream. Smoke rose from the chimney at all hours. Inside there was always a fire, and there was always the loom. It stood at the center of the single room, older than the house, older perhaps than anything nearby except the mountain behind it. The loom was tall, made from the wood of the very first tree. Amma was almost always at it. Sometimes she was cooking or sleeping or standing in the doorway, watching the valley below, but not often and not for long, because cloth was not what she was weaving. Amma was weaving the weather. What came off the loom was the feeling of an afternoon in late summer when the light goes golden and slow and something in the chest opens for no reason. It was the first cold breath of autumn through an open window. It was the weight of a gray morning when grief sits close, the sound of rain on a roof, the strange comfort of rain even in sorrow. She wove drought, and she wove the first rain after drought. She wove the silence after an argument and the soft word that follows silence. She wove the way joy arrives sometimes without warning, on an ordinary morning, uninvited and luminous, and none of it was a mistake. This had taken her a long time to understand, longer than the making of several mountains. In the early years of her work she had grieved the difficult weather and tried to set it aside, had looked for ways to weave around it. But the work always suffered when she did. It went thin in the middle. It lost its depth. She came to see that the difficult weather was load bearing, that it held the rest of the work in place, that without it the beautiful things she wove had nothing to rest against and so could not be fully felt. She had learned to trust the weather she least wanted to make. This was not a comfort she could hand to anyone who arrived at her door. It had to be lived toward, earned, slowly, understood in experience rather than the mind. But she held it anyway, steady as the fire, for anyone who came needing it without knowing that was what they needed. And many came. They had always come, the lost and the grieving, the ones who had outrun their own understanding, the ones who had been through something they had no words for. They found the path up through the pines, the way water finds its way down to the sea without being shown, drawn by something they could not name. They arrived at the low door. They knocked, or they did not knock, and simply stood there until she opened it. And she always opened it. Mira arrived at Alma's door in autumn. She had been walking for what felt like a very long time, though she could not have said where she had started or how she had come to be on this particular path, winding up into the hills above the valley. This is the nature of the kind of walking Mira was doing. It was not the kind with a map. She was young and she was tired in a way that sleep had not touched. There was a weight she carried that had no name, or rather, it had too many names and none of them quite fit. She had tried to name it for years, turning it in her mind the way you turn a word you've suddenly forgotten, certain it will come, yet watching it not come. The trouble at the center of Mira's life was this. She could not find the place where she ended and the world began. She felt everything too close. Other people's joy made her joyful, and other people's pain made her ache. And sometimes she could not tell which feelings were hers and which she had borrowed without meaning to. She had a self that needed to be seen and was ashamed of needing to be seen. She reached for things, and when she got them, found they were not quite the shape she had imagined. She could not decide whether that was the fault of the thing or the reaching or the one doing the reaching. Worse, she watched herself. Always she was slightly outside her own life, observing, narrating, judging the performance. She could not simply eat a meal or walk through the forest or love someone without a part of her standing to the side, arms crossed, taking notes. She had not told anyone this. It seemed too ordinary to say aloud, yet also too enormous. She had walked up into the hills because something in her needed to move, and because the valley below had begun to feel like a place where everyone else understood the rules of a game she had never been taught. She did not know she was looking for anything. She did not know there was anything to find. She was simply moving the way a person moves when staying still has become impossible. She smelled the smoke before she saw Amma's house, then the light in the low window, then the sound, steady, rhythmic, felt in the chest before it was heard, with the ears coming from inside. She stood at the door for a long time before she knocked. The sound stopped, and a few moments later Amma opened the door without hurry, without surprise. She was very old. How old was difficult to say, the way the age of a mountain is difficult to say. Her face held everything that faces hold when they have been through a full life, the lines of laughter and the lines of grief laid down in the same skin, running alongside each other like rivers that have learned to share a valley. Her eyes were dark and very still. She looked at Mira as if she had been expecting her. Come in, she said. There is fire. The room was warm and low and full of the smell of wood smoke and something green like rain on spring leaves. The loom stood at the center of it, still now waiting. The fire was a steady amber. Mira sat in a chair near it and felt, without understanding why, that she had been sitting in this chair before, in some other life, or perhaps in this one, and she had simply forgotten. Amma poured tea and sat across from her and said nothing. The loom began to move. The fire breathed Outside. The wind had come up and was moving through the pines, and the sound it made was ancient and indifferent and somehow kind. Mira watched Amma at the loom for a long time. She watched the shuttle cross and return, cross and return, and she began to feel the rhythm of it somewhere deep in her body, slow and patient, the way you can feel the presence of the sea before you hear it, when you are still some distance away and the world has not yet opened up to show you the water. What Amma wove that night was sorrow, not any one person's sorrow, the great common sorrow that moves through all lives, the one with no single cause, the grief of being alive and temporary and loving. Things that change. It came off the loom as the particular quality of light on the day. You understand that something is over. It was the feeling of reaching for someone in the dark and finding them there, the ache that lives inside beauty, the knowledge carried quietly in every living thing that time moves in one direction. Mira did not know that this was what Amma was weaving. She only knew that sitting in that warm room with a fire and the steady sound of the loom, she felt for the first time in a long time that her sadness was allowed, that it did not need to be explained or justified or hidden behind a more acceptable feeling, that it could simply sit beside her, the way a tired animal sits beside a fire and rest. Amma wove, and the fire held its amber, and the night pressed gently against the windows. After a long while, Amma spoke. She did not look up from the loom. Everything you feel is weather. The kind that hurts is not a mistake. Mira said nothing. Something in her chest moved, like ice moving in a river when the temperature finally turns. Amma kept weaving. I have woven drought, she said. I have woven the first rain after drought. They are not opposites. They are the same thing. At different moments Mira heard this, not as instruction but as something she had always known and lost hold of and was now being quietly returned. The fire burned lower. Amma rose from the loom and moved to the small window and looked out at the dark. The valley below was invisible, swallowed by cloud, the way valleys disappear on autumn nights when the temperature drops and the world draws a soft curtain around itself. She stood there a long time, watching the darkness. She was thinking about all the things she had woven that had looked in the middle of the work like ruin, the years she had woven for people who could not see any further than their own grief, the long passages of time that seemed only to interrupt or undo what had come before. She had learned to keep working through those passages. She had learned that the design was larger than any one portion of it, and that what looked like an ending was most often a turn, and that the turn almost always led somewhere she could not have reached by any other path. The years that looked like nothing, that was what she thought about most standing at the window in the dark. The years that looked like nothing from the outside, when a person was simply enduring, simply getting through, simply keeping one hand on the wall and moving forward in the dark. Those years were not wasted. They were the years the roots went down, the years the foundations set. She had woven enough to know that what happened in those quiet underground years determined almost everything that came after. The depth of the roots, the breadth of the canopy, the capacity to hold. When the hard weather came, Amma turned back toward Mira, who was still in the chair by the fire. But her eyes had closed, her hands rested open in her lap. Her breathing had slowed to something long and even, the way breathing goes when the body at last decides and it is safe and releases what it has been holding. Ammo watched her for a moment. Then she returned to the loom. She did not weave sorrow anymore. That night she set it aside and took up something else entirely. She wove the particular warmth of a room with fire in it while the cold waits outside. She wove the feeling of being held by something larger than understanding. She wove the quality of rest that comes when you stop even briefly, trying to be other than you are. She wove the loosening, the long exhale, the weight leaving the shoulders, the moment the mind releases its grip on the day and lets the darkness be dark. These were some of the finest things she made. The work was quiet and it did not announce itself, but it lasted, the kind of thing that holds and Mira dreamed. In the dream she was standing at the edge of a wide field at the end of summer. The grasses had gone gold. The light was low and long and moved across the field in slow waves, the way it does in the late days of a season when the world seems to be taking its time with everything, savoring the last of the warmth before it turns. There was a feeling of something finishing, but it was a peaceful feeling, the feeling of something completing itself, of arriving at its natural end, the way a song arrives at its final note, and the silence after is part of the music. She looked down and saw that she was holding the end of a thread. It was thin and ordinary, the color of winter light. It ran from her hand out across the field and into the distance, where it disappeared not into darkness but into more field, more light, more of the world continuing beyond what she could see. And she understood, the way you understand things in dreams, in the whole body at once, that the thread had passed through many hands before hers, hands she would never know the names of, hands that had held it in their own darkness, their own confusion, their own years that looked like nothing. They had held it and passed it forward and it had come to her and she had held it in her turn, and when her time came she would pass it forward too, and it would go on into hands she could not imagine in times she would not see. She stood in the gold field and felt the thread in her hand and felt beneath the feeling something that felt like peace, the sense that she was neither the beginning nor the end of anything, that she was a moment in something long, that this was enough, that this was in fact everything. She opened her hand. The thread lifted in a breath of wind and moved away across the field into the light, toward whatever it was becoming. She stood and watched it go. She felt in watching it go lighter than she had felt and longer than she could remember. She did not know how long she slept. When she woke, the fire was low and red and the room was filled with the quiet that belongs to the hours before dawn, when the night is fully itself, when everything is still and the world seems to be resting in its own depths. The loom was still. Amma sat in the chair across from her, eyes closed, hands open in her lap, Mira sat with the quiet for a while without moving. She felt emptied out, clean, the way you feel after a long cry when the grief has moved through you and left you feeling so clear. Through the low window she could see that the sky was beginning its slow change, the darkness shifting at its edge, not yet light but carrying the first memory of light, and she thought about what Amma had said about drought and the rain that follows drought. She thought about the thread passing through her open hand in the dream. She thought about all the feelings she had carried for so long, like problems requiring solutions, and she tried to hold it instead, the way Amma held the difficult threads, not as a mistake, not as a wound, but as material, as the thing from which something was being made, even now, even in the dark, even when she could not see it. She did not feel certain, she did not feel healed. But something had shifted, something small and significant, the way a single stone shifting can change the course of water. She was still herself, still the one who watched, still the one who reached, still the one who could not always tell where she ended and where the world began. But she was sitting in a warm room at the edge of things, and it was almost morning and somewhere in the night she had slept without holding herself together, and the world had held her instead. She left before dawn. She set her cup on the table and pulled her coat around her and opened the low door as quietly as she could. The cold came in and the smell of the pines and the particular sweetness of the air just before light arrives. She paused in the doorway and looked back at the room, the fire just embers now, the loom still Amma in the chair, her face carrying its long history, her hands open and at rest. And then Amma, without opening her eyes, said one last thing. Come back when you need to. Everyone does. Mira stepped out into the dark. She walked back down through the pines as the sky lightened slowly behind the mountains. By the time she reached the valley the sun was coming over the ridge and the frost on the grass was beginning to twinkle. The world below was just where she had left it, the river, the houses, the roads, the lives of people moving through their ordinary mornings. She had not solved anything. She had not been given a key. But she had slept. She had dreamed. She had sat for one long night in a warm room while something ancient wove the weather and did not look away from difficult things. She had felt her sadness rest beside her like a tired animal, and she had not tried to send it away and somewhere in all of that something had loosened. She walked into the morning and down toward the village and Alma remained by the loom as she always had, as she always would, smoke rising from the chimney, the loom moving through its long patient arcs, weaving the gray mornings and the gold ones, weaving the nights of loss and the mornings that follow loss and the slow ordinary days that come after those mornings, weaving the moment a person forgives something they believed they never could, weaving the last good day spent with someone before anyone knows it is the last. She did not hurry, she did not stop. And when the next lost soul came climbing up through the pines, drawn by the smoke and by something older than memory, she would open the door, she would say come in. There would be fire and the steady sound of the loom and all the long unhurried night for whatever needed to settle. Rest well, friend. Good night.