← Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Between Ocean and Sky - The Sleepy Journey of One Drop
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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
Why Choose a Sleep Number?
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C
Smart Bed Can I make my sight softer?
- [00:33]
A
Can I make my sight firmer? Can we sleep cooler?
- [00:36]
B
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- [00:59]
D
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- [01:14]
A
Yeah.
- [01:15]
D
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- [01:48]
C
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- [02:22]
A
Hello friends. Welcome back to Listen to Sleep. This week the winter rains have returned to the mountain. I can hear the creek below the cabin swelling with the runoff, its voice growing louder every day. The small seasonal streams that disappear in summer are flowing again, carving their patient paths through moss and stone. And I've been thinking about water this week. How it moves through the world, how it changes form but never disappears. How it connects everything. And tonight's story is called Between Ocean and Sky. The sleepy journey of one drop. It follows a single raindrop through this great cycle, from cloud to earth to the deep darkness underground, from spring to creek to river to ocean, from the quiet depths of the surface, through storm and calm, and finally back to the sky again. This is a story about transformation, about trust, about letting go and being carried by forces larger than ourselves. It's about the journey we're all on. Changing form, moving through darkness and light, becoming and returning again and again. But mostly it's a story about remembering that we're part of something ancient and ongoing, that we've been everything. That the same elements that make up a drop of rain make up you and me. We're not separate from the world, we're expressions of it. So let yourself drift as we follow this drop on its journey. Let the words wash over you like rain. You don't need to follow every detail or remember every moment. Just let the story carry you the way water carries minerals from mountain to sea, the way the cycle carries us all. Before we begin tonight, I want to let you know that creating Listen to Sleep is such a big part of my life's work and your support makes a huge difference. If these episodes help you find a little peace, I would be so grateful if you'd consider joining Listen to Sleep plus for less than the cost of a latte each month, you'll get ad free episodes with no interruptions and extended readings not released anywhere else. You can join@listentosleep.com support or now you can subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts and if you do that, you can also get a seven day free trial. Thanks so much for your support. Let's take a deep breath in and out, letting go of the day, feeling the weight of gravity pulling you deep down into the mattress. Another deep breath in 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's okay. Just let yourself drift off between ocean and sky. There are journeys we take that change us, and journeys that remind us we were never separate from the world at all. This is the story of such a journey. You are a single drop of rain. For now you rest within a cloud held suspended in the cool stillness of the sky. All around you, countless other drops drift in gentle currents of air. Each One catching and scattering the light. You have no weight here, no heaviness. You simply are. The cloud that holds you is soft, vaporous, made of the same substance. You are just water, suspended between earth and sun. But something is shifting. The cloud that holds you has grown heavy with moisture, dense with the collected breath of the ocean far below. You can feel it. A subtle change in the air, a gathering density. And now, after days or perhaps weeks of collecting, you feel the first stirring of release. There is no resistance in you, no fear, only a quiet readiness, like a breath held and now gently released. And then you let go. You fall. The sensation is immediate and complete. The air rushes past you as you plummet earthward, drawn by the ancient pull you cannot name but trust completely. Around you, your companions fall as well, a gentle rain that whispers through the atmosphere, leaving trails of coolness in the warm summer air. The world below rises to meet you. You can see the canopy of the forest now, the dark green of pine and fir, the lighter green of oak and maple. Individual trees become visible, then branches, then leaves. And then you meet the earth. You land on a broad leaf, and for one perfect moment, you rest there, a jewel in the dappled morning light. You can feel the surface tension holding you together, keeping you whole and round. The leaf beneath you is smooth, waxy. Below, the leaf bends slightly under your weight, so slight, barely measurable, yet still present. But the leaf is tilted, and gravity continues its patient work. You roll slowly at first, gathering speed, until you slip over the edge and fall again, this time only a few feet into the soft, dark soil below. The forest floor welcomes you. The earth here is rich with the decay of countless seasons, soft with moss and fallen needles. You sink into it easily, drawn down by the same force that brought you from the sky. The light fades as you descend, filtered through layers of organic matter, through root systems and the delicate threads of mycelium, through soil and clay and stone, down, down into the darkness. And here, in this deep place beneath the world, you come to rest. The darkness is not empty. It is full. Full of presence, full of ancient substance. The temperature here is cool and constant, unchanging through seasons you can no longer sense. There is no wind here, no weather, no movement of air, only the slow, steady patience of the earth. You settle into the spaces between particles of soil. The minerals here are older than forests, older than the mountains themselves. There is iron, leached from stone over millions of years, its metallic taste subtle but present. There is calcium from the shells of creatures that died when this land was ocean floor. Compressed and dissolved over epochs you cannot comprehend. The darkness around you is complete. Not the darkness of night, which is merely the absence of the sun and will give way to dawn. This is the darkness of deep earth, which has never known sunlight and never will. And yet it is so peaceful. It is restful. It is the darkness of the womb, of the seed before germination, of all potential, waiting patiently for its moment. You rest here for a long time. How long? Time moves differently in the darkness. There are no days here to count, no seasons to mark the passing of months. The surface world continues its cycles. Far above winter, snow falls and melts. Spring brings new growth. Summer heat bakes the soil. Autumn leaves drift down. But here in the deep earth, all is constant. Your boundaries begin to soften. The sharp definition between you and the water around you blurs. You are still yourself, still one drop among many, but you are also becoming part of. Of something larger. The minerals surrounding you begin to dissolve into you and you into them. You are water, yes, but you are also iron now, and calcium and trace elements whose names have not yet been spoken. This is the great work of groundwater, this slow, patient dissolution and transport of minerals from stone to soil, from mountain to sea. And you are part of it. You sink deeper still, following invisible pathways through the bedrock, through cracks and fissures worn by countless drops before you over countless years. The pressure of the earth above is immense. You can feel the weight of soil and stone, of roots and trees and mountains all pressing down. But it does not crush you. Instead, it simply is. And you move through it, molecule by molecule, drawn by gradients of pressure and temperature. This is the deepest place, the oldest darkness. Here in the aquifer, far below the surface world, where every space between every grain of sand is filled with water. You become timeless. You could rest here for centuries. Some drops do. But you. You are called onward. You feel it at first as a slight shift in pressure, a subtle gradient, barely perceptible. Then as a barely detectable current. The aquifer is not still. It flows slowly, so slowly, but it flows nonetheless, and you flow with it. The current is gentle but persistent. It pulls you through channels in the limestone, past the roots of ancient trees that tap this deep water in drought years. The pressure begins to shift. The water around you is moving now with more purpose, drawn by an opening somewhere above. Up, up through the darkness. The stone around you changes character. The dense bedrock gives way to more fractured stone, then to sand and gravel, then to soil. The temperature shifts slightly, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, light. It is Dim at first, green and filtered. But it is unmistakably light. And with it comes something you haven't felt since you left the sky. Movement, current, Flow. You emerge into the light at the edge of a spring. The water here is crystalline, bubbling up from the darkness below into a small pool lined with smooth stones worn round by dark decades of water flowing over them. The sunlight reaches down through the clear water and you can see everything, the sand at the bottom stirred gently by the continuous upwelling. The stones are colors you'd forgotten existed, tan and gray and pink and white, each one polished by patient water. Small fish dart between the shadows. Watercress grows along the edges of the pool, its roots trailing in the current, its leaves bright green above the surface. A dragonfly lands on a stone, its wings like stained glass in the morning sun. But the pool is full, always full, and its edges overflow continuously. The spring water spills into a small channel, and you flow with it. The channel becomes a creek, narrow and quick, tumbling over stones that were once mountains. The sound is everywhere now, the constant music of water meeting stone, water meeting air. It changes pitch and rhythm with every shift in the stream bed. Here, where the water narrows between two rocks, a high singing. There, where it widens into a shallow pool, a deeper murmur. You swirl in a pool beneath an overhanging willow with its branches trailing in the current. The pool is deeper here, slower, and you settle for a moment in the gentle rotation of an eddy. A turtle suns itself on a log, but the current pulls you on. The creek is growing now, fed by other springs, by runoff, by the slow seepage from hillsides. The stones are larger, the current is stronger. You catch and release the light as you flow, creating patterns of brightness on the stones below. A deer comes to drink at dusk, lowering her head carefully. You are part of the water that sustains her, that has sustained countless creatures for as long as this creek has flowed. The creek widens. Other creeks join it, each bringing their own water, their own dissolved minerals. Where they meet, the waters swirl together, mixing gradually becoming one. And with each joining, you become part of a larger flow. The current is steady now, purposeful. The water is no longer crystalline, but brown with sediment, carrying soil from the mountains to the sea. This is the earth itself in motion, particles of granite and shale, the very substance of the mountains, being slowly transported downstream. You are part of this ancient process now, this patient work of leveling mountains, filling valleys, reshaping the world grain by grain. You have become a river. The river moves through forest and farmland, its course Winding in great, lazy curves. You flow past small towns where children play on rope swings. You flow through wetlands where herons fish in the shallows, standing tall and motionless. You flow for days, maybe weeks, the landscape gradually changing. The mountains fall behind. The river widens, deepens. The current slows but never stops. And then you notice it. Salt. It's faint at first, barely detectable, but with each passing mile, it grows stronger. The river widens further, becomes brackish. The current slows. Tides begin to push back against you twice daily, mixing salt with fresh in an ancient rhythm. Marshes spread on either side, vast expanses of cord grass turning golden in the late afternoon light. Fiddler crabs scuttle across the mud at low tide. Egrets stalk through the shallows. And then, finally, you reach it. The ocean. The river releases you into the vast blue, and suddenly you are a part of something so large it has no edges you can perceive. Water stretches in every direction, meeting the sky at a horizon so distant it seems to curve with the earth itself. The taste of salt is everywhere now, strong and mineral and ancient. The water is alive, full of microscopic plants and animals, of fish and dolphins and whales whose songs echo through the depths of. The density is different too, the salt making you more buoyant. You float on the surface for a time, warmed by the sun, rising and falling with the swells. These are not the sharp waves near shore, but the long, deep swells of open ocean, rhythmic and mesmerizing. Up you rise slowly, taking perhaps 30 seconds to climb from trough to crest, then down equally slowly, into the next trough. Sea birds fly overhead, gulls and terns and albatross with wings that span nearly 12ft. The sky is enormous, more sky than you've seen since you were part of the cloud. And you remember, distantly, like a dream, that you came from there once. But the ocean has depths you haven't known yet, and something in you responds to that call. You sink. The surface light fades quickly. The brilliant blue of shallow water darkens to deep blue, then to indigo. The temperature drops. The pressure increases with each meter you descend. Down here, there are creatures that make their own light. Fish with lanterns dangling before their jaws. Jellyfish that pulse with bioluminescence, creating galaxies of cold light. Squid with lights along their tentacles flashing in patterns. You sink deeper still. The zone of twilight gives way to complete darkness. The only illumination comes from the creatures themselves, brief flashes and glows that appear and disappear like stars through clouds. Here in the abyssal depths, the world is vast and still. The temperature hovers just above freezing, strange fish drift past, their movements slow and deliberate, conserving energy in a place where food is scarce. You sink deeper still, approaching the ocean floor. Here, nearly three miles below the surface, pale crabs scuttle across the mud sea. Cucumbers filter the sediment. Tube worms cluster around volcanic vents, surviving on chemicals rather than sunlight. You settle onto the ocean floor. The mud here is. Is soft, made of the microscopic shells of countless tiny creatures that have drifted down over millennia. This is the ooze that will someday, millions of years from now, be compressed into chalk and limestone, rising as new mountains. It is cold here, silent, or nearly so. You can hear the crackling of the Earth itself, the slow grinding of the continental plates. Peaceful. You rest here in the deepest place you've known since the aquifer. And once again, time becomes fluid, unmeasurable. There are no seasons here, no day or night. You simply exist. But the ocean is always in motion, even here. And slowly, you feel a new sensation. Warmth. It rises from below, from volcanic vents where the Earth's heat escapes into the water. The warm water is less dense than the cold water around it, and it rises. And you rise with it. Up, up through the darkness, degree by degree, through zones of bioluminescence, through zones of blue twilight, up through schools of fish that move as one organism, up through layers of temperature and salinity, each one creating a subtle boundary. You break the surface. Far from land, in the open ocean. The sun is brilliant overhead. And beneath you, the warm current continues to rise, spreading across the surface, carrying tropical heat toward the poles. The surface water here is warm, almost hot. And something is building. The wind has been strengthening throughout the day. The swells grow larger, more organized. The sky begins to change, high clouds forming and thickening. Then the air becomes thick, humid, heavy with moisture evaporating from the warm ocean, and the pressure begins to drop. You are lifted on the wind. The storm builds around you, gradually following the laws of thermodynamics and fluid motion, converting the sun's energy stored in warm water into the kinetic energy of wind. And the wind strengthens. The sea surface begins to churn. The swells become waves, and you are part of that spray. Now, lifted from the ocean surface, suspended once more in air, you rise into the storm. The updrafts carry you higher, drawn by the vast circulation. It is a system, a pattern, one of the Earth's ways of redistributing heat. The wind moves in great spiraling circles, organized around the center. A calm eye. You rise higher in the updrafts, carried by wind, moving with strength and purpose, part of a pattern that has repeated throughout Earth's history. And the wind carries you for miles, around and around the storm's eye. And then, gradually, the storm begins to weaken. The warm water that fueled it is left behind. As the storm moves into cooler seas, the winds begin to slow. The rain becomes less intense. The churning clouds begin to dissipate, breaking apart. The storm passes. You fall again, but gently this time, as soft rain on an ocean that is already beginning to calm down. The swells flatten. The wind drops to a whisper. The sun appears through breaks in the clouds, painting the water silver and gold. You land on the surface of a sea that is becoming glass. The water is warm. The sky is clearing, the last storm clouds drifting away, dissolving as they go. And you float here, rising and falling with the gentle breathing of the ocean as the last clouds dissolve overhead and the blue deepens toward evening. The sun is low now, approaching the horizon, painting everything gold and orange and pink. The hair is calm. The world feels washed clean. And then you feel it. The lifting. The sun's warmth is drawing you upward. Your molecules are moving faster now, vibrating with the absorbed energy. Molecule by molecule. You are becoming lighter. Your bonds with the other molecules of water begin to loosen, then break. You are evaporating, returning to vapor, to air, to sky. And you rise, slowly at first, invisible, just one molecule among countless others, leaving the ocean surface. The transition is so gradual, it's almost imperceptible. No clear line between being water and being air. Just a slow change of state. And you rise through the warm air, through the evening light, through the first stars appearing in the darkening east. The ocean falls away below you, its surface catching the last light of day. You rise still higher. The air cools as you climb. The water vapor around you begins to condense, molecule by molecule, forming tiny droplets. You join with other molecules, becoming part of a droplet, then of a larger droplet. And slowly, gently, you find yourself once again part of a cloud. The cloud is thin at first, just wisps of vapor, turning pink in the sunset. But as more water evaporates from the ocean below, the cloud thickens, grows. Other clouds form around you. The evening sky fills with them, catching the last light. You have returned, but you have not returned unchanged. You carry within you the memory of deep earth and deeper ocean. You carry the taste of minerals leached from ancient stone, the taste of salt from the primordial sea. You carry the knowledge of darkness, the patient darkness beneath mountains, the vast darkness beneath oceans. You Carry the memory of stillness and of storm, of slow seepage through stone and wild rise through hurricane winds. You are a drop of rain and you have been everything. The earth beneath you, the rivers that shaped it, the ocean that receives all rivers. The storm that redistributes the heat. And now the cloud again, suspended between earth and sun, between ocean and sky. You have traveled from cloud to earth, to sea to sky to cloud. The great cycle, the water cycle that has continued for billions of years since the first water condensed from the steam of the young earth. And you will continue. The cycle never ends. There is no final destination, no ultimate resting place, Only transformation, again and again from one form to another. But for now, in this moment, you rest. The cloud that holds you drifts slowly eastward on the evening breeze. Below, the ocean darkens as night falls. Stars appear overhead, countless points of light in the deepening blue. The air is cool and calm. The world is at peace. And someday, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in a week or a year, you will let go again. You will fall again. The cycle will continue as it has continued since the beginning. For now, though, you rest in the cloud, suspended in the gentle evening air, held by nothing more than the breath of the world itself, part of the ancient pattern, the endless dance of water and earth and air and sun. And in this moment, this perfect moment between journeys, you are home. You are complete. You are exactly where you need to be. And all is well. All is well. Good night.