← Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
The Glass Beach - A Story About What We Carry Back from the Places that Change Us
00:36:09
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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.
- [00:30]
B
We're lost. It feels like we're going round in circles. I'm gonna ask that man for directions. Hi there. We're trying to get to the state fairgrounds.
- [00:40]
C
Well, you're going to take a left at the old oak tree at this here road. Nah, I'm just kidding. Let me get my phone out.
- [00:46]
B
How is their signal out here?
- [00:48]
C
T Mobile and US Cellular are coming together. So the network out here is huge. We get the same great signal as the city, saving a boatload with benefits. And there's a five year price guarantee too. Okay, here's the turn.
- [01:00]
A
Actually, can you pull up the way to a T Mobile store?
- [01:04]
C
America's best network just got bigger. Switch to T Mobile today and get built in benefits the other guys leave out plus our five year price guarantee. And now T Mobile is available at US Cellular stores in hermiston Best mobile network based on analysis by Ooklo Speed test intelligence data. Second half of the 2025 bigger network. The combination of T Mobile's and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network's coverage price guarantee on talk text and data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See t mobile.com for details.
- [01:29]
B
Do you ever find yourself scrolling through headlines and thinking, possibly screaming at least on the inside that can't be true. There's rising rates of vaccine preventable diseases and someone on the Internet saying that watermelon juice is a natural alternative to sunscreen. Just no. I'm Chelsea Clinton and that can't be true is back for season three. My guests and I cut through a lot of chaos to help all of us understand what is true, what is overblown and what's false.
- [02:01]
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 over the years, I've learned that there's a kind of becoming that doesn't announce itself. It's the kind that happens in the middle of ordinary things, in the repetition of work in the long hours of a difficult season, or the slow accumulation of days that don't feel like they're adding up to anything. And then one morning you look at something you've looked at a hundred times before and you see it differently. You understand something you couldn't have understood before because the understanding needed all that time to arrive. Tonight's story is about that kind of becoming. It follows a young woman named Saoirse, a boat builder's apprentice, on the day she comes home to the small coastal village where she grew up, changed by six months of hard work and a quiet teacher and a long winter. Far from everything familiar, it is about what we find when when we return to the places that made us, about the conversations that happen without words, about a glass beach on a northern island where the sea has been taking broken things and turning them into something beautiful for longer than anyone can remember. Before we begin, can I ask you for a favor? If you've read my new book, Awaken youn Myth, could you please leave an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads or wherever you bought? Helps so much to get the book into the hands of the folks who it'll really help most. And if you haven't read it, 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 understanding through the modern science of mindfulness and the ancient wisdom of the Hero's journey. You can find links to buy and review it in the show notes and if you've already left a review. Thank you so much for your support with this. It really means a lot to me. 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 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 is okay. Just let yourself drift off the glass Beach. There is a beach on an island off the northern coast where the sea gives back what it has broken. For as long as anyone in the village of Karamore could remember, the tide had been returning. Things smoothed and softened and made into something new. Bits of old bottles, green and brown and sometimes the pale blue of shallow water. Pieces of crockery with faded patterns still visible along their curves. Shards of things that had once been sharp, rounded by years of salt and tumbling stone until they glowed like small moons along the waterline. The people of Karamore called it the glass beach, and they thought nothing remarkable about was simply there. The way the headland was there, the way the smell of low tide was there. One of the ordinary facts of home. Saoirse had grown up filling her pockets with sea glass on the way home from school. She knew how to read the colors. White came from old milk bottles, brown from medicine jars and ale. Green was the most common, blue was the rarest. Blue meant something had traveled far before finding its way here. She had left Karamore on a gray October morning, not yet 20, with a canvas bag and a letter of introduction from her father, the boat builder who had taught her everything she knew about wood and water. The letter was addressed to a woman named Aillin in the harbor town of Strandhaven, who was said to be the finest builder of small vessels anywhere. The work will change you, her father had said. Come back and show me. He smiled broadly, standing in the doorway of his workshop with his arms crossed and the gray sea behind him. She had not understood what he meant when she left. She thought she understood it now. On her last morning in Strandhaven, Saoirse woke before the light. She lay still for a while in the narrow bed in Aelin's loft, listening to the harbor. Strandhaven's harbor was nothing like Caramore's. It was bigger, louder, the sound of it constant, and various boats of every size moving in and out at all hours. In the early months she had found the noise difficult to sleep through. By winter she had stopped noticing it. Now, on her last morning, she was aware of it again. The creak of hulls, the low churning of an engine Somewhere in the dark, the slap of water against the stone key, and she lay there, taking it all in, storing it. The workshop was below the loft and she could smell it even up here. Timber and linseed oil and the faint mineral tang of metal tools. She had spent almost six months breathing that smell. It had worked its way into her clothes, her hair, the skin of her hands. She thought it would take a while to leave her. She dressed quietly and went downstairs. Aylin was already there, of course. She was always already there. She was at the bench with her back to the door, doing something small and precise by lamp light, fitting a piece of hardware to a tiller, her movements slow and sure. She did not look up when Saoirse came in. She was a small woman in her 60s, with white hair cut close to her head and hands that were rough and capable and knew things that the rest of her didn't need to say out loud. Saoirse made tea on the small stove and set a cup beside Aylin. Without interrupting her. She sat on the stool near the door and looked around the workshop, at the half built hull on its cradle in the center of the room, at the ranks of tools on the wall, at the paper patterns hanging from the rafters like dried leaves. She had a feeling that was something like grief, though it wasn't quite that, the feeling of the present becoming the past. Aylin set down her work and picked up the tea. For a while they sat in the quiet of the workshop, the lamp burning between them, the harbor going about its business outside. Saoirse thought about the first weeks, how she had watched Aylin work and understood almost nothing, not because the techniques were beyond her, but because Aylin moved from such a different place than she did, where Saoirse had been taught to measure and plan. Aylin seemed to listen. She would hold a piece of timber for a long time before cutting it. She would run her thumb along the grain and then stand still, as if waiting for an answer. It had taken Saoirse months to understand that this was the teaching, not the techniques, but the quality of attention behind them. Then Alin said, without looking at her, I hope you'll come back. Saoirse nodded. Aylin picked up her work again and that was all. Saoirse finished her tea, gathered her bag and walked out into the gray morning. The bus north left from the top of the quay and at half past seven she was the only one waiting. The land changed slowly as the bus moved north. In the early hours. The country was Wide and flat, big farms, straight roads, towns with roundabouts and retail parks. Then gradually it shifted. The fields grew smaller, the hedges higher and wilder. The road wound more. The further north she went, the more the landscape seemed to pull itself inward, becoming quieter and more particular, until finally the sea appeared to the west, gray, green and flat under the noon light, and she felt something ease in her chest at the sight of it. Not excitement, just a quiet release, the way a held breath lets go. She had used the long hours of the bus ride to do nothing in particular. She watched the land. She thought in an unfocused way about the months behind her and the months ahead. She had spent six months thinking purposefully, solving problems, learning, attending closely to the work. And the blankness of the journey somehow felt right, like the pause between one thing and the next. The bus came into the port town of Ardmore just after noon. She had an hour before the ferry. She bought a sandwich from a shop on the quay and ate it, watching the water, thinking about nothing much. The ferry was small, the same crossing she had made all her life, just an hour and 40 minutes if the seas were calm. She sat on the upper deck with her bag between her feet and watched the island come toward her out of the north. It appeared first as a low shape on the horizon, dark against the pale sky, and then slowly it became specific, the shape of the headland, the white of the lighthouse, the cluster of buildings at the harbor. The smell of the island reached her before they docked. Wood smoke and brine and the particular sweetness of the sedge grass at the top of the dunes. She had not known that smell could be named until Aylin told her that was what Strandhaven had given her more than anything else, words for things. She had always felt she had meant to come home at Christmas. The weather had closed in and the fairies stopped running. And then January came and it just seemed easier to stay. She had written to her father and he had written back two lines in his careful hand. The workshop is here. So am I. She had read it many times over the winter. She walked up from the harbor into the village in the mild afternoon light, the way spring light always seems, like the world has recently been washed and hasn't quite dried yet. She walked slowly past the post office and the pub and the small grocery where Moira Begley had worked behind the counter for Saoirse's entire life. She passed the school with its empty yard, the day still being a school day, the sound of children's voices just audible behind the windows. She passed the houses she knew by their curtains and their gate colors and the particular way their chimneys smoked. Everything was the same, yet she moved through it differently. It was like reading a book again after a long time, the words unchanged something in her that was not. Near the harbor wall she passed old Colin sitting outside the chandlery on his usual chair, a mug in his hand, watching the water the way he had been watching it when she left. He raised the mug. When he saw her, she raised her hand back. He did not call out or make a fuss of it, and she was grateful for that. In Karamur, coming home was just coming home. There was no performance required. She stopped at the wall above the harbor and looked down at the boats. She could name them all. She had grown up knowing them the way you know the faces of neighbors. Now she looked at them with different eyes. She could see how they sat in the water where the weight was distributed, the particular logic of how each hull had been built to do what it was asked to do. It was strange and good to look at home and see more than she had seen before. She picked up her bag and walked down the quay. Her father's workshop sat at the far end, past the lobster pots stacked in salt bleached towers and the black painted shed that belonged to the fisherman's co op. It was a stone building with a corrugated iron roof and two wide doors her father always left open when the weather allowed. The smell of fresh cut timber drifted out across the pier. She stopped outside and listened, the plane moving in long, slow strokes, the thin sound of wood shaving away from wood. He hadn't heard her arrive. She stood in the doorway and watched him, the set of his shoulders, the patience in the way he worked. He had gone a little gray at the temples since she left. Da, she said. He looked up, put down the plane, and crossed the workshop in four steps. The hug smelled of sawdust and the soap he had used all her life. Neither of them spoke. Outside, the gulls called. The boats pulled softly against their moorings. He made tea on the small stove in the corner and they sat on upturned crates the way they always had, the way they had been sitting since she was small enough that her feet didn't reach the ground. She told him about Strandhaven, about Aylin, who spoke very little but communicated a great deal about the harbor and learning to read the grain of a plank the way you'd read a sentence. Her father listened with his cup held in both hands. He always listened, as though what you were saying really mattered. She told him about the winter, the weeks when the dark came early and the rain came sideways off the harbor, and she had stayed in the workshop long after Aylin left, sanding and re sanding things that were already smooth because the work steadied her and she hadn't wanted to go upstairs to the loft and and be alone with the unfamiliar dark. She had not been unhappy exactly. She had been in the uncomfortable middle of something which is its own kind of difficulty. She told him about the moment it shifted, a morning in February when she had looked at the hull they were building and understood it as a whole, all at once, the way you sometimes understand a piece of music you've heard many times and then one day simply hear. She had stood there for a long time, just looking. Aylin had come in, looked at her, looked at the hull, and gone to put the kettle on without saying a word. Her father nodded slowly. He understood about the moment things shift. He had been building boats his whole life. After a while he set down his cup and nodded toward the workbench. She went and looked. A keel roughed out in oak, the beginning of something small and seaworthy. She could see the grain running through it, the way the wood had been chosen for this purpose. She touched it lightly with her fingertips, feeling where the grain rose and where it lay flat. Her father watched her do this and said nothing. He handed her the plane. It was his good one, the old wooden bodied one he kept sharp and oiled and did not usually let others hands near. She had used it as a child once without asking, and he had sat her down and explained very quietly why that was not something she should do again. Now he just handed it to her. She took it, felt the weight of it, and set it to the wood. The first stroke was good. She felt it in her palms and wrists, the blade finding the grain, the wood giving cleanly. Her father watched for a moment, then turned back to his own work. They spent the rest of the afternoon working alongside each other. She planed while he fitted joints, and for long stretches neither of them spoke. She had wondered on the ferry whether it would feel awkward, whether her six month absence would have put some strangeness between them. It didn't. The workshop had its own rhythm and the and they found it easily the way you find your footing on familiar ground. The tools passed between them without words, the shavings gathered at their feet. The light came through the open doors at a long angle, lying warm across the floor. At some point j she became aware that she was Simply there, not thinking about Strandhaven, not thinking about what came next. Just in the workshop in the afternoon, planing a piece of wood beside her father. The feeling was so ordinary and so good that she didn't examine it. She just let it be. That evening they walked to the glass beach. The path down from the road was steep and grassy, and the light was softening toward that spring evening quality, luminous and unhurried, the kind of light that seems to want to stay. The gorse on the headland was in bloom, yellow and extravagant, and the air was warm and still and smelled of it. The beech appeared below them as they came over the last rise, a crescent of small, smooth stones, and among the stones, the glass. Saoirse stepped down and heard the sound beneath her feet. She had forgotten the sound, or thought she had. Now it came back to her all at once, the memory arriving in the body before the mind has a chance to reach for it. The dry, intimate shifting of sea glass against stone. She stood still and twisted her feet for a moment, just listening to it. The tide was low. The beach was wide. In the long evening light, the wet glass caught and held the color of the sky, the pale amber of it, and the gray, and here and there, a piece of blue that seemed lit from within. She walked slowly, as she had always walked here, eyes down, watching. Her father walked beside her with his hands in his pockets. The water moved at the edge of the beach in long, slow withdrawals, leaving the wet stones dark and gleaming. The glass was different in every season. She had learned this as a child without being taught it. In winter the beach was stripped bare, the glass buried deep under stones, churned by heavy weather. In summer it rose to the surface, sorted by the tides into loose drifts of color along the waterline. Now, in late April, the beach was generous. The winter storms had turned everything over and the spring tides were laying it back down, piece by piece, in no particular order. A brown shard beside a white one beside a rare piece of deep blue, opaque as old ice. She crouched and picked up a piece, green, rounded, milky at the edges. She turned it over in her fingers, whatever it had once been, a bottle, a jar, something broken and thrown or lost, that was gone now. Only this remained, this small, smooth thing made beautiful by a process that had taken years and asked nothing. She stayed crouched for a while, looking at the glass in her palm. Then she told her father about the yacht. 40ft, a full racing rig. Aylin had been commissioned to build it and had asked Saoirse to come back in June to be there for the whole build. It would take a year, maybe a little more. Her father stood beside her, looking out at the water. He was quiet for a long while. A wave came in, spread thin across the stones, and pulled back. He crouched down and moved his hand slowly through the glass near the water line, the way she had seen him do a hundred times when she was small, his fingers sorting through the pieces with a patience that was just part of him. He found what he was looking for and stood up. A piece of blue glass, small and oval, worn smooth. He turned it over once in his fingers, then put it in her coat pocket. Without saying anything, she looked at him. He looked out at the water. They stayed on the beach until the light was nearly gone, the tide moving in around their feet, the glass around them fading slowly into the darkening stones. That night in her childhood bed, Saoirse lay listening to the house. It was different from Aylin's loft. Quieter, the sounds more familiar, the low moan of wind finding the gap above the bedroom window that had always been there, the distant sea, which was not the sound of Strandhaven's harbor but the sound of open water, wider, slower, coming in long intervals, like breathing. She looked at the ceiling, the same ceiling she had looked at all her life, its same small stain in the corner where the roof had leaked years ago, its same hairline crack running from the light fitting toward the window. She had looked at this ceiling through fevers and through ordinary nights and through the long wakeful weeks before she had left for Strand Haven. Now she looked at it again and felt it differently, not with the restlessness of before, but with something quieter. She thought about Aylin in her workshop in Strand Haven, working late by lamplight, her hands moving over timber with a sureness that had taken decades to arrive at. She thought about the yacht that was coming, the long months of it, the problems that would need solving, the particular satisfaction of working at the edge of what you knew. She thought about her father asleep across the hall and the workshop and the keel in oak on the workbench, and the afternoon they had spent together without needing to say much of anything as the room became dark. It was the kind of dark that only comes away from the cities, the window a pale rectangle. The wind moved outside, the house, made its small sounds. The sea came and went in the distance, the same as it always had, the same as it would after she had gone and come back and gone again. Rest well, friend. Good night.