Eric (0:00)

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.

Huggies (0:29)

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Eric (1:08)

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Eric (1:49)

Hello, it's Eric, your mountain grandpa, here with another original bedtime story to help you relax and drift off to sleep. You know, living up here on the mountain, I've come to see how everything in nature has its own seasons. Some are bright and bursting with life. Others are quieter, slower, and sometimes full of loss. But even those seasons have their place. They shape us. They soften us. And they often reveal something we wouldn't have seen in any other way. Tonight's story is a gentle one, but it does touch on grief. It follows a fox who loses her mate and for the first time in her life, stops running. What begins as heartbreak slowly becomes something else. Stillness.

Doritos (2:55)

Healing.

Eric (2:57)

A quieter way of being in the world. It's not a sad story, but a peaceful one. A story about how we change when we let ourselves feel what's real. And if that's something you're ready for tonight. I think you'll find some comfort in it. 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 in with me. And out. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be. This is your time. Quiet time. One more deep breath in with me. And out. If you get tired while I'm reading to you, that's okay. Just let yourself drift off. The Fox who Stopped Running There was once a fox who could outrun the wind. She was quick, quicker than a shadow slipping across snow. Her paws barely touched the earth when she ran, and she ran often through fern soft undergrowth and across stony ridges, between silver birches and down to slow moving streams. She ran to hunt, she ran to play, and sometimes she ran simply to feel the wild in her bones. But mostly she ran with him. He had a darker coat and a steadier pace, but he could keep up. They ran like two flames along the ridgeline, always together, never needing to speak. And then one winter he didn't wake. He had curled beside her beneath the twisted roots of a hollow oak, the way he always did, nose to tail, warmth against warmth. But in the pale light of morning only she stirred. His chest was still. His breath had gone. Wherever breath goes, and the hollow was quiet in a way she had never known before. At first she thought it was a mistake. So she nudged him, waited, nudged again. She circled the hollow three times, ran to the nearby stream and back, listened for his step, sniffed for his scent. But he didn't move. She sat beside him until the shadows grew long. Then, as the stars came out, one by one, she ran. Not toward anything, not away either. She just ran. The forest blurred past her, trees whispering, the moon riding low above the pines. Her paws pounded the frost hardened ground, her breath coming in hot clouds. She ran past their old den sites and snow covered meadows, past sleeping owls and stony clearings. But no matter how fast she ran, the hollow came with her. Not the hollow in the tree, the one inside her. It was a quiet kind of ache, not loud, not sharp, just there, like a silence where sound used to be. She ran until her legs trembled. She ran until her lungs burned, and when she could run no farther, she stopped beside a crooked old stump and lay down in the frost. The wind whispered through the branches above, but she didn't hear it. Her ears were turned inward, listening for footsteps that wouldn't come the next day. She tried again, and the next she ran until her muscles refused, until the ache in her chest outlasted the ache in her legs. And then one morning, just before dawn, she couldn't run at all. Her legs folded beneath her as if the earth had pulled her down. She lay still, breathing softly, and something inside her whispered, enough. Not enough running, enough resisting. So she stayed. Not for any noble reason, not because she wanted to, but because she couldn't do anything else. She stayed in a thicket near the meadow, hidden from the wind. The sun rose and fell, the moon waxed and waned. She barely moved. The forest didn't ask her to. And in the stillness, something began to happen, not healing, not yet, but something gentler. The ache didn't go away, but it stopped chasing her, and for the first time since the Hollow, she let herself listen to the silence and to what it held. And the wind whispered, nothing can be outrun forever. The days passed in a kind of hush. The fox didn't count them. She no longer chased the sun or raced the moon. Instead, she curled beneath the low branches of a juniper bush where the ground stayed dry and the snow gathered soft around the edges. Sometimes she would open her eyes to see the branches shifting in the wind. Sometimes she would close them again without moving. She ate what she needed when it was easy, drank from the small stream where the ice was thin. But mostly she was still. She didn't know what she was waiting for. She only knew that she couldn't go back to how it was before. One afternoon the old badger passed by. He stopped a few paces from her, sniffed the air, and said nothing at first, just settled his heavy body beside her on a nearby stone. I haven't seen you run lately, he said after a long while. The fox didn't answer. The badger didn't seem to mind. He scratched behind his ear with one thick paw, then added, I used to run once before my mate passed. I thought the world would split open. Thought I might, too. Still the fox didn't speak, but her ears turned slightly toward him. The badger got up, not needing a reply. It's all right, you know, he said gently, to stop. And then he was gone. Later that night, the fox curled tighter, the badger's words echoing faintly. It's all right to stop. She had always run to feel alive. But now, sitting still, she began to feel something else, something she hadn't let herself feel before. Not sorrow exactly, not fear, just a deep, deep, quiet ache that felt like missing. It didn't ask to be solved. It didn't need to be named. It was just there like the sky before snow, like the hush after a song ends. In the days that followed, she noticed things she had never taken the time to see before. The way the light filtered through the trees differently at dusk, the shape of a single leaf pressed into the snow, the slow rhythm of a woodpecker's tapping far off in the distance. And underneath it all, a silence that felt less like emptiness and more like space. A space where something might grow, but only if she didn't rush it. One evening, as she watched the stars come out, soft pin pricks in the velvet dark, she felt something shift. Not outside, inside. It wasn't an answer. It wasn't a reason, just a small loosening, like a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. And the wind whispered, not everything lost must be found. The snow had begun to melt, not quickly, just enough that patches of brown earth peeked through the frost, and the stream near the thicket had started to murmur again, breaking its long silence in little sighs and trickles. The fox sat beside it one morning, nose close to the surface, watching the water swirl around a fallen leaf. It had been weeks, maybe more, since she'd last run, and in that time something inside her had softened. Not healed, not filled, but softened. The way ice softens when the sun rests its hand on it, slow and without fanfare. The ache was still there, but it had changed shape. She began walking more, not far, not fast, a few steps beyond the thicket, then back again. Some days she'd follow the stream. Other days she'd simply lie in a patch of sun and do nothing at all. This wasn't the kind of living she had known before, but it was still living. She even started noticing her breath, how it moved through her when the breeze was still, how it warmed the air when the mornings were cold. And once, lying on her side in the low grass, she noticed her heart, its slow, steady rhythm. For so long she'd only felt it when it raced. Now it pulsed like a quiet drum, keeping time even in stillness. One day a young hare bounded into the clearing, startled to find the fox so near. He froze, eyes wide, body tense. The fox didn't chase him. She didn't even move. She simply looked at him and said softly, you're safe. The hare blinked. Aren't you the one who used to race the wind? He asked. I was, she said. He tilted his head. Why don't you run anymore? She thought for a long moment before answering. Because I lost something I couldn't run past. The hare didn't speak, but after a While he sat down beside her. Not close, not far, just near enough. They watched the sky shift together, and the silence between them didn't feel empty. That night, as the stars shimmered through bare branches, the fox curled up beneath the juniper bush and felt the hollow inside her again. But this time she didn't try to fill it. She just rested there, like laying in a nest she hadn't realized she'd built. And the wind whispered, grief is not a wall but a doorway. The days stretched gently. Each morning the fox would wake beneath her juniper bush and listen, not with her ears alone, but with something quieter inside her. The forest had grown familiar in its silence, but now she began to sense it differently. Not as background, but as something alive, almost responsive. There was the creaking of branches she hadn't noticed before, the hush of wind moving low to the ground, tiny wings beating overhead in slow patterns. Even the earth beneath her paws seemed to hum faintly. It wasn't that the forest had changed. It was that she had stopped trying to outrun it. One morning she followed the song of a thrush through a birch grove and found herself by a fallen log covered in moss. She didn't plan to stay, but something about the way the sunlight landed on the bark felt inviting. She lay down beside it and rested her head. Time passed, but not in hours. In shadows, in bird song, and the way the breeze shifted direction and brought with it the scent of damp pine and rich soil. And as she lay there, eyes half closed, a thought arose. Not like the fast, racing thoughts she used to have, but slow and spacious. The forest is grieving, too. Not for her, not for her mate, but in its own way. The trees shed their leaves, the rivers let go of the ice. Even the clouds move on in a dance of forming and. And dissolving. Everything changed here. Everything let go, and yet nothing rushed. That evening she came upon a ring of mushrooms nestled in the grass. She sat beside them for a long time, imagining what it might be like to live slowly enough, to grow like that, low to the ground, soft, unhurried. To be still and yet connected to everything. Something in her softened even more, not yet into happiness, but into a kind of kinship. Grief, she realized, didn't isolate her. It joined her to the world because everything in the forest knew loss, and everything still lived. The light began to reach farther now, slipping through the bare limbs like gold dusted threads. Shoots of green pushed tentatively up through the earth, and the air smelled less like ice and more like possibility. Spring was not here yet, but it was on its way. The fox moved a bit more freely now. Not because she had returned to her old self, she hadn't. But because something in her had grown spacious enough to hold both movement and stillness. She still carried the ache, but it no longer dragged her down. It moved with her, like a companion walking just behind her shoulder. One morning she returned to the hollow oak she hadn't meant to. Her paws simply brought her there, slow and quiet. The tree looked smaller than she remembered, though. The roots were just as gnarled, the entrance just as dark. She stood at the edge for a long time, nose to the bark. There was no sign of him, of course, only the faint scent of old memories and cold earth. She didn't cry, she didn't speak. She just stepped inside and curled up in the same place where they used to sleep, where he had slept that last night. The moss had grown back. It was soft. She let the ache come closer, not to overtake her, but to sit beside her. It pulsed gently, not as something to escape, but as something to feel. It no longer asked why. It no longer begged for meaning. It simply said, I. I was here. I mattered. And that was enough. In the days that followed, she found herself noticing other things too. Small things. The way the pine needles glistened after the rain, the way the breeze sometimes smelled like wild garlic, the soft sound of owl wings just before dawn. And inside her, something unfamiliar began to stir. Not urgency, not joy exactly, just the faint sense that there was more life ahead. Not in the way she'd known before, but in a quieter, truer way. One afternoon she trotted farther than usual through a narrow grove and across a sun warmed log. As she paused to drink from the stream, a squirrel chattered down at her from a branch. You're moving again, the squirrel said. The fox looked up and smiled. Just a little. I'm not running, she said. I'm just here. The squirrel considered this. Isn't it the same thing? The fox shook her head gently. No, not anymore. And as she padded slowly back toward the thicket, the wind rustled the trees above her, and the wind whispered, this is how every ending begins again. The seasons turned as they always do. The snow melted completely. The stream rose with melt water and began to sing again, louder than before. Buds broke along the open branches and the forest filled with the quiet murmur of spring. The fox watched it all from her resting place beneath the juniper. She still didn't run, but she did move softly, slowly, with presence through the brush, across mossy stones, beside young deer and curious crows. Sometimes she remembered how it felt to race the wind, and sometimes she missed it. But she didn't chase those memories anymore. She had learned that the fastest way to lose herself was to try to outrun what hurt. Now she let the ache walk beside her, not as something unfinished, but as a welcome truth. One warm dusk she found herself back on the ridgeline, the same one they used to race along. The view stretched wide, hills beyond hills, trees swaying in the breeze, a few stars just blinking into view. She sat at the edge and breathed in the evening. There were no answers here, no great revelations, just wind and sky and the quiet rhythm of her heartbeat. It was enough. She lay down in the long grass, her tail curled around her nose. A night bird called far off. A frog croaked somewhere below, and as her eyes grew heavy, she felt it. Not the pain, not even the missing, but the stillness that had grown around it. The kind that doesn't need to be filled. The kind that stays. She didn't know what tomorrow would bring, but she didn't need to. Because for the first time in a long while, she wasn't running away from anything. She was just here, alive and still and enough. And the wind whispered, nothing is lost that love remembers. Good night.