← Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
The Invisible String - A Story of Connection and Renewal
00:35:03
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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.
- [00:30]
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]
B
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 2025 bigger network the combination of T Mobile's and US Cellular's network footprints will enhance the T Mobile network' price guarantee on talk, text and data exclusions like taxes and fees apply. CT mobile.com for details. Before we had AT&T business wireless coverage, our delivery GPS wasn't the most reliable. Once our driver had to do a 14 point turn to get back on route. A 14 point turn. An influencer even livestreamed the whole thing. Not good for business. Now with AT&T business Wireless, routes are updating on the fly and deliveries are on time. And the influencer did get us 53 new followers though. AT&T business Wireless connecting changes everything.
- [01:59]
B
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- [03:04]
A
Hello friend, it's Eric. Welcome back to Listen to Sleep. Tonight we're going somewhere soft and green and just barely warm, that particular kind of April day that feels like a promise being kept. If you've been around for a while, you know that I am a swiftie and you might remember a story about Taylor's farm from last fall. The pumpkin patch, the golden October light, the hayride that turned turned into something else entirely. Well, it's spring now on Taylor's farm. There's a ring on her finger and flowers to plant, and three cats who have very strong feelings about freshly turned soil. So let your breathing slow down. Let the day fall away behind you like a coat sliding off your shoulders, and come join me for a spring day in Taylor's garden. Before we begin, I have a little news. My first book has been out in the world for a few weeks now, and it is getting great reviews, and I'm so happy about that. It's called Awaken your Myth and it's a beautiful, fully illustrated hardcover that guides you through six steps combining ancient myth and and modern mindfulness to help you move from feeling stuck into a life of real joy and presence. It took me a lifetime to learn what's in that book and over three years to write it. If you've been seeking peace, and if you've been waiting for a life that feels like yours, you're exactly who I wrote this book for. Find it wherever books are sold or@awakenyourmyth.com book there's a link in the show notes. 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 and out. If you get tired while I'm reading to you, that's okay. Just let yourself drift off. The invisible string. The morning had come in soft, not dramatic about it. No blazing sunrise, no sudden warmth. Just a slow brightening at the edges of the curtains, a bird song starting up somewhere in the maple tree, and the particular quality of April light that makes everything look like it's been washed and hung out to dry overnight. Clean, beginning again. Taylor had been awake before it arrived, lying still in the pale dark, thinking about the cutting garden. She'd been designing it in her mind for years, long before she had the land for it. She'd been collecting the idea of it, little mental notes tucked away like seeds in a paper envelope. Ranunculus, those pale coral ones that look like they're made of tissue paper. Sweet peas climbing something old and wooden. Lisianthus, which takes forever and is entirely worth it. Peonies. Obviously she could not have a cutting garden without peonies, big blousy ones that smell like something you remember from a long time ago and can't quite name. She'd always put it off too much just for herself. She used to think too much garden for one person to justify. But that was before Travis had sat down next to her at the kitchen table on a Tuesday in February, looked at her notebook full of sketches and varietal names and spacing measurements, and said, when are you planting this thing? Not are you going to plant it, but when, like it was already decided, like it was already real, like her wanting it was reason enough. She'd looked at the ring on her hand and then at him, and then she'd said, april. And now it was April. She got up while the house was still quiet, pulled on her oldest jeans and a flannel shirt she'd had so long it had gone soft as a second skin, the one with the fraying cuffs she meant to cut off and never did. She put the kettle on. She looked out the kitchen window at the beds she'd prepared last month, dark and damp and waiting, and felt something rise in her chest that was too big for the early morning to contain. Meredith appeared on the counter beside her, having materialized from nowhere in the way that gray cats do. She sat with her folded ears slightly angled forward, watching Taylor with an expression of measured concern, as if the emotional significance of this day had already been assessed and logged. It's a good day, taylor told her. Meredith blinked slowly. Obviously the blink said, I knew that before you did. Travis had left three days ago. A commitment, something that had been on the calendar since January. She'd driven him to the airport herself, and they'd sat in the car at the departure drop off a few minutes longer than was probably practical, not saying much, just together, the way they'd gotten so good at being together, which was the thing she hadn't expected, that it would feel so natural so quickly. She'd spent so many years telling herself she preferred the solitude of this farm and then found out she'd just been waiting for the right person to share it with. I'll be back Thursday, he'd said. I know, she'd said. He'd kissed her forehead, that particular Travis forehead kiss that she was fairly certain had healing properties, and then he was gone, and she'd driven home with the windows down and spring air coming through and thought, this is fine, this is good. I have the garden. And she did. She carried her tea out to the beds as the sun got itself properly organized. Above the hills. The soil was almost right. She'd checked it yesterday, crumbling a handful between her fingers, feeling for that particular looseness that meant it was ready to receive things. One more turn with the hand fork and it would be perfect. Olivia arrived from somewhere in the orchard, her white coat carrying several small leaves and one piece of bark that she wore with complete dignity. She proceeded directly into the nearest bed and began patting the soil with one experimental paw, then the other, in a rhythm that suggested she was either testing its structural integrity or performing some kind of feline acupressure. Out, taylor said. Olivia looked up, blinked, and continued patting Olivia. The padding became more thoughtful, more considered, a slight tilt of the head as if new data was being incorporated. Taylor sighed and went to get her tools. She started on the east side with the ranunculus corms that had been soaking overnight in a bowl of water in the mudroom, wrinkled and strange, looking like tiny brains, which was not the romantic image she preferred to hold while gardening, but there it was. She set them out in a row on the garden path, each one an eventual bloom, and thought about how much faith this required, how you had to believe in the thing before you could see it. She pressed the first corm into the soil three inches deep and moved down the row. There was something settling about the repetition of it. Reach, press, cover, move, the kind of work that didn't require thinking, that actually resisted it, that asked only for her hands and her presence, and let everything else go quiet. Benjamin appeared at the edge of the garden and regarded her with his usual expression of warm, slightly anxious devotion, his orange fur bright as a marigold in the morning light, his plumed tail held low and gentle. He was the only one of the three who understood on some deep feline level that garden beds were not for cats. He sat just outside the edge of the path stones and watched her work, occasionally shifting position to stay in her peripheral vision, his purr steady and companionable, audible from three feet away. She talked to him while she worked. She'd always talked to her cats, not because she expected answers but because the talking was a kind of thinking out loud, a way of letting the inside become outside. I'm going to put the sweet peas along that fence, she told him. The old section where the wood is grayed out. I think they'll look good against it. Travis says the fence needs replacing, and he's right, but not yet. Benjamin's purr did not waver. Yes, it said. Continue. The peonies go in the middle section. We probably won't see them this year. Peonies take time. They won't bloom until next year, maybe not till the year after, but we'll plant them now. She stopped, thought about the phrase she'd just said, we'll plant them. She hadn't been thinking about him when she said it, and then she had, and it was like a light coming on in a room she thought was empty. We'll plant them next year. He'd be here. The year after that they'd be wherever they were, whatever they'd built. But the peonies would bloom. She'd plant them for that future, the one she could see now that she couldn't see before, the one that kept unfolding every time she thought she'd reached the edge of it. She had to sit down on the path for a moment. Benjamin walked forward and headbutted her knee. I'm fine, she told him. He head butted her knee again, more firmly. I'm happy, she said. That's all. He turned twice and settled against her shin, his purr ratcheting up a register, warm and orange and constant, and she sat in the morning garden and let herself feel the size of it, the way her life had become big enough to need planting, the way she was putting down roots now, actual and metaphorical, in this soil, on this farm, with this person she hadn't seen coming, who had knelt under an oak tree last October and made everything that came before feel like it had been leading there. There was a mug on the windowsill of the mudroom, his from the morning he'd left. She'd meant to wash it and kept not doing, had a small chip in the handle that he'd gotten sheepish about when he first noticed it, and she'd said she liked it better that way. She thought about that every time she saw it now, which was many times a day. How he got sheepish about small things, how big he was and how soft. How that combination had taken her entirely by surprise. She worked through the morning. The lisianthus seedlings went in next, all 13 of them lifted one by one from their tray with the care you'd give something fragile and and worth the trouble. She worked slowly, pressing the soil firm around each stem, making sure each one stood straight before moving on. Her mind drifted and returned and drifted again, landing on him each time the way a moth returns to a particular window, not frantically, just persistently naturally. He had spent the winter reading about soil amendments. She hadn't known this until she found the library book on the kitchen table in December, a thick technical thing about composting and soil structure with three of his bookmarks in it and pages of notes tucked between the leaves in his handwriting, which she'd had to read twice to believe. Good for drainage. One note said, Ask T if she does this already. She'd stood at the kitchen table holding that book for a long time, something rearranging itself quietly in her chest. He'd never mentioned it, never asked her about it in the end. Just learned things, read and thought and noted in case it was useful because it was her garden and he cared about her garden because he cared about her. She'd told him later that she'd found the notes. He'd shrugged and looked out the window and said, soil's interesting. She planted the sweet pea seeds along the fence line, spacing them carefully, pressing each one into a small hole she made with her finger. Sweet peas were old fashioned in a way. She loved the kind of flower that appeared in paintings of cottage gardens, impressed arrangements from a hundred years ago. They didn't last long, once cut only a few days in a vase, but they were extravagant and fragrant, and she'd wanted them for as long as she'd wanted this garden. And now here she was, pressing them into the earth, one by one along a graying fence in April, and she was, she realized, profoundly, quietly, absurdly happy. Meredith walked along the top rail of the fence for the length of the sweet pea section, supervising from above with her folded ear, dignity intact. Twice she paused and looked down at Taylor's hands with the focused attention of of someone spot checking a colleague's work. It's fine, taylor told her. Meredith moved on. She broke for lunch in the barn, sitting on a hay bale in the open doorway where the sun came straight in and turned everything golden. She ate her sandwich and looked at the garden from a distance. The dark beds, the path stones, the first small evidence of her work, the markers she'd put in the turned earth, the possibility of it all. From here it looked like a plan, like an intention made visible. She thought about that for a while. Intention. How long she'd walked around this farm with so many of them. To plant this, to fix that, to eventually, to someday, and how something had shifted in the past year, since October, since the oak tree and the lanterns and the question that had changed the shape of everything, how someday had become now, how the intentions had become gardens. His jacket was on a hook just inside the barn door. He'd worn it out here in March, helping her turn the beds, showing up on a Saturday morning in his good jeans. She'd warned him. He hadn't listened. And working beside her for three hours without complaint, without checking his phone, just there, just present, moving compost with a quiet determination that made it clear he'd fully decided the garden was also his problem and wasn't reconsidering. She walked over and looked at the jacket. Barn, dusty now, with a smear of soil on one sleeve. She didn't touch it. She stood there with her sandwich and the barn smell around her, hay and old wood and the ghost of horses in the walls, and felt him in the room, the way you feel a presence. Not haunted, the opposite of haunted, inhabited. The farm felt inhabited now in a way it hadn't before, like it had finally filled in all the way. Olivia appeared in the barn doorway, trotted past without acknowledgment, and disappeared into the shadows at the back, where she appeared to have ongoing business she preferred not to discuss. Taylor spent the afternoon on the peonies. These were the patient ones. You planted them now and you waited. And the waiting was not a lack but a kind of faith, the same faith as the ranunculus corms, the same faith as pressing sweet pea seeds into cool earth and trusting April to know what it was doing. She'd ordered the roots in January, kept them cold in the barn, and now she set each one in its place with more care than anything else she'd planted today. Deep enough, but not too deep. Peonies were finicky about depth. They'd sulk for years if you buried them wrong, and she had no interest in sulking. Peonies Benjamin supervised from the path stones with his tail wrapped around his feet. His expression was one of total attentiveness, as if recording all of this for later. She thought about what she'd told Travis in the car at the airport after they'd sat together in a silence that was comfortable and full. I'm planting a few things that might not bloom for a couple of years, she'd said. He'd looked at her. The peonies, she'd said, and the roses. Some things take a long time. He'd taken her hand and held it and said, that's okay. We've got time. We've got time. Such a small sentence, such an enormous one. She pressed the last peony root into the ground and covered it with her hands, feeling the coolness of the soil, the slight give of it. Two years from now this would be a bloom the size of a small cabbage, white or blush or deep rose. She'd chosen a mix and didn't yet know which would come where, which she liked. She liked that some of it was still a surprise. Two years from now she'd be married. She'd cut peonies from this garden and put them in rooms in this house, and who knew what else might be different by then, what new life might be taking shape, what small chaos might be running through the yard just beyond reach. She sat back and looked at the row. Meredith appeared beside her as if she'd been there all along, pressed her gray folded ear, head briefly against Taylor's shoulder, and then walked off with her usual dignity, as if the moment had been her idea entirely. The light was going golden when Taylor finished, that particular low April light that comes in sideways and makes everything look significant. She walked the beds one more time, slowly, the way you walk, something you've been working on, not inspecting, just with it, acknowledging it. The farm was very quiet, birdsong winding down, a breeze moving through the maple tree, the creak of something wooden settling into the evening. She stopped at the fence where the sweet peas were planted and looked at the graying wood and the bare soil and the invisible futures pressed into it, and thought, there's a thread that runs from somewhere I've never been all the way to here. She'd felt it before, that feeling, that sense of something pulling her along, a route she couldn't see the shape of until she was standing in it. All the roads, the wrong turns and the right ones, the years of not quite knowing where she was going, all landing here, landing with him, the invisible string of it, the way it all felt inevitable from a vantage point that hadn't existed until now. She thought about him in an airport or a hotel room, maybe, reading. He read before sleep now she'd given him that, and the thought made her ache a little the good kind, the kind that meant I love this person and they aren't here right now and Thursday is close but not today. The porch light was already on. She'd set it on a timer back in November when the dark came early and never changed, threw a soft yellow circle on the path, a beacon for no one and everyone. She went to it and the cats followed, Olivia first brisk and purposeful, the leaf still inexplicably in her fur. Then Benjamin, close to Taylor's left ankle, purring like something that runs on affection and never runs out. Then Meredith last, pausing once to look back at the garden as if making a final assessment, as if confirming that things were proceeding exactly as they should. Taylor sat down on the porch step. The night was coming in slowly, blue and cool, and the garden was there in front of her, dark and planted and full of everything she'd put into it, the faith of it, the patience of it, the we of it. She didn't call him, she didn't need to. He was in the jacket in the barn and the chipped coffee mug and the soil amendment notes she'd shelved between his things and hers without thinking, because that was where they lived now. He was in the peonies that wouldn't bloom for two years. He was in the sweet peas she'd planted for the both of them. Thursday was coming and the garden was in, and the porch light made its small yellow circle in the dark like a quiet, faithful welcome. Meredith settled on the step beside her. Benjamin put his chin on her knee. Olivia went inside through the cracked door, apparently satisfied that the outdoor portion of the evening had concluded and the farm breathed and everything that had been planted waited in the good dark of the earth, and somewhere there was a thread that ran from here to Thursday, from here to always, from here to everything she was going to grow. Rest well, friend. Good night.