← Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
The Journey to Stillness - A Dreamy Norse Myth for the Turning Year
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Transcript16 lines
- [00:01]
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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.
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This holiday, Verizon is giving you incredible gifts and savings you'll enjoy all year. When you Switch, you'll get four new iPhone 17 Pros. No trade in needed. That's right, get four lines for just $25 a line and the amazing iPhone 17 Pro for everyone. Save big this holiday. Visit Verizon today. 20 monthly promo credits applied to account over 35 months with a new line on unlimited welcome. In times of congestion, unlimited 5G and 4G LTE may be temporarily slower than other traffic. Domestic Data roaming at 2G speeds. Additional terms of high phone offer. See verizon.com for details.
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We live in a culture obsessed with dieting, weight loss and exercise, and that can make eating disorder behaviors easy to miss. But the reality is eating disorders are serious mental illnesses that take a major toll on your health and your life. But recovery is possible. Eating disorders are more common than you might think. Chances are you know someone who is struggling with one, or maybe you're struggling yourself. If you're concerned about an eating disorder in yourself or a loved one, I want to introduce you to Equipment. Equip is a fully virtual evidence based eating disorder treatment program that helps patients achieve lasting recovery at home. Every EQIP 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 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.
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Today's trivia quiz is on mobile games.
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All right, I'm very excited about this one. I'm going to give you a few hints.
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Ready?
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Ready.
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This game has no ads and no.
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Need for Wi Fi to play. Wait, so does it cost a lot of money? Nope.
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It's completely free to play.
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What? No way.
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It has amazing graphics and they recently.
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Added a bunch of new mini games. Hold on Is that Royal Kingdom?
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Yes.
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Bingo. So if you haven't played Royal Kingdom.
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Yet, go to the App Store or Google Play and download it for free. Hello friend, it's Eric. Welcome back to Listen to Sleep, where ancient wisdom meets Deep Rest. I hope you had a peaceful holiday. The dogs and I have been enjoying some quiet days here at the cabin between Christmas and New Year's. It's been wet and cold and the creek is running high from all the rain we've had, and I managed to get a bit of a cold. You might hear it, but that's okay because it's a good time for fires and blankets and long sleeps. Tonight's original story is inspired by Norse mythology, but you don't need to know anything about the Norse gods to enjoy it. It's a tale about a young God named Vidar who thought he needed to be different from who he was. Louder, brighter, more like his brothers Thor and Balder. His father, Odin walks him through the winterlands of Midgard, asking gentle questions, watching his son try to be something other than himself. And slowly, over days and miles and quiet moments, Vidar begins to understand that the stillness he carries isn't emptiness, it's its own kind of presence. Before we begin, I want to thank all of you who support this podcast. Creating a new episode every week is only possible because of listeners like you who subscribe to Listen to Sleep Plus. For just $4.99 a month, you get access to over 500 premium episodes with no ads or interruptions, plus eight full length sleepy audiobooks. If you'd like to support the show and help keep these stories coming, you can visit listentosleep.com support or just click the link in the show notes. 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. And 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 journey to stillness. Long ago, long before the world had learned to count its winters, before time itself had settled into the rhythm of years, when the gods were still young and the nine realms were still finding their shape, there lived in Asgard a son of Odin who had not yet found his way. His name was Vidhar. In those days, the gods were still becoming who they would be. The halls of Asgard rang with their discovering Thor, finding the weight of his hammer. Balder, learning the warmth that lived in his smile. Freya understanding the wild magic that moved through her hands. But Vidar. Vidar was quiet. And in a world of gods who were all becoming something loud and bright and unmistakable, quiet felt like not becoming anything at all. He was not like his brothers. Thor was thunder and strength, laughter that shook the rafters of Asgard's great halls. When Thor walked, the ground knew it. When he spoke, everyone listened. Not because they had to, but because his voice filled the space like summer filling the sky. Balder was light itself. Beautiful, yes, but more than that, beloved. When he entered a room, people softened. Their shoulders dropped. Their breathing deepened. He carried peace the way dawn carries color. And Vidar? Vidar was quiet. He moved through the halls of Asgard like mist moves through a forest present, but barely. He spoke rarely when others gathered to tell stories of their deeds. He listened from the edges of the firelight when the gods feasted. He ate in silence, watching the flames dance, watching the faces around him glow with wine and warmth. He was strong, stronger than most knew. His hands could shape iron. His feet, it was said, would one day wear shoes that could walk through anything. But the strength lived inside him like a banked fire, quiet and waiting. And this bothered him. It bothered him because he thought it meant something was missing, that he was incomplete somehow. Not God enough. Not bright enough. Not loud enough. So one midwinter when the world's balanced on the edge between darkness and the slow return of light, Vidar made a decision. He would change. He would become like his brothers. He would learn to laugh like Thor, to shine like Balder. He would speak more, move more, fill more space in the world. He would become different from what he was. The next morning Odin found him in the courtyard of Asgard, practicing. Vidar was trying to laugh, big booming laughter like his brother's. But it came out forced, brittle, breaking against the cold air like thin ice. Odin watched for a while, leaning on his staff, his single eye, taking in everything his son was trying to do. Vidar, he said quietly. The young God stopped mid laugh, embarrassed. Father, what are you doing? Vidar looked down at his hands. Practicing. Practicing what? Being. Pdar hesitated. Being more. Odin was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, would you walk with me? It wasn't really a question. They descended from Asgard by the long path, the one that wound down through the roots of Yggdrasil, past wells and the deep places where the tree drank from the memory of the world. They walked through the gate between realms and into Midgard, the middle world, the one where humans lived and died and wondered about the gods. It was deep winter there, too. Snow lay thick on the ground and the mountains rose dark against a pale sky. The forests were silent, not with emptiness, but with the particular quiet of winter, when everything alive has gone deep into itself to wait. They walked for a long time without speaking. This was Odin's way. He did not rush to explain things. He did not fill silence with words just to fill it. He simply walked and noticed, and sometimes asked questions. Finally, as they climbed a low ridge between two valleys, Odin spoke. Why do you want to be more? Vidar didn't answer right away. He was watching his breath make clouds in the air, thinking about how to explain it. Because he said at last, I am not like them, Thor and Balder. I don't. I. I don't fill a room the way they do. I don't make people feel things just by being there. And you think you should? Shouldn't I? Odin stopped walking. He turned to look at his son, really look at him the way he looked at things. He wanted to understand completely. What do you think quiet does? He asked. Petar frowned. Nothing. That's the point. It's just absence. Odin smiled, a small smile, barely there, is it? And he started walking again. They walked for days through forests where snow bent the branches of pine and fir into arches overhead, across frozen lakes where the ice sang and cracked beneath them, up into the high mountains where the wind carved the snow into shapes like frozen waves. And along the way Vidar tried different things in a village they passed through. He tried to be like Balder, to smile widely at strangers, to speak warmly, to make people feel seen. He found a child crying outside a house and crouched down, trying to offer comfort the way he'd seen his brother do so effortlessly. Don't cry, he said, and his voice came out stiff, uncertain. Everything will be well. The child looked at him with wide, confused eyes, then ran inside to find her mother. Vidar stood there in the street, feeling the falseness of it settle like stones in his stomach in a great hall where jarls gathered to feast and make alliances. He tried to be like Thor, to tell stories loudly, to drink and laugh and slap shoulders. He told a tale of a battle he'd witnessed, trying to make his voice boom, trying to make the room lean in, but the words felt hollow, the laughter he forced felt brittle. The jarls nodded politely and turned back to their own conversations, leaving him standing there mid story, the rest of his words dying in his throat. He tried to drink with them, to match Thor's easy camaraderie with the cup. But the mead tasted wrong in his mouth, and the laughter around him seemed to come from very far away, like he was hearing it through thick ice. Each time Odin watched, he didn't stop Vidar. He just noticed. And sometimes when they were alone again on the path, he would ask a question. How did that feel? What did you notice? Were you there when you were doing that? Vidar didn't always have answers. One evening they stopped to make camp in a pine forest deep in the mountains. Snow was falling, soft, slow flakes that caught the last light and turned gold. Before they landed, Odin built a fire. Vidar gathered the wood, moving quietly through the trees. When he came back, arms full of branches, he found his father sitting very still, just watching the flames begin to catch. Vidar set down the wood and sat across from him. For a long time neither of them spoke. The fire grew, the snow fell. The forest held them in its vast, patient silence. Finally Vidar said, I don't know how to be different. Different from what? Odin asked. From this. Vidar gestured at himself. Quiet, still small. Odin looked at him across the fire, the flames reflected in his single eye. Do you think stillness is small? Vidar didn't answer. The mountains are still, Odin said. Are they small? That's different how mountains are. They're solid. They're here. They have presence. And you don't. Not like Thor. Not like Balder. Odin poked the fire with a stick, sending sparks spiraling up into the dark. Your brothers are who they are, he said quietly. And you are who you are. Neither is more, neither is less. Just different. But their way matters, Vidar said. People need Thor's strength. They need Baldur's light. What do they need from me? Odin was quiet for a long time. Then he said, what does the forest need from silence? They stayed in that camp for three days. It wasn't planned. They simply stayed. Odin didn't seem to be in any hurry. He sat by the fire or walked slowly through the trees or stood at the edge of the clearing, looking out at the mountains. Sometimes he spoke. Mostly he didn't, and Vidar found himself settling, the way snow settles on branches, the way a stone settles into earth. He stopped trying. He sat by the fire and watched it burn. He walked through the forest and felt the cold air in his lungs. He stood in the falling snow and let it gather on his shoulders, in his hair, turning him slowly white. He was just there and something strange happened. He began to notice things the way the firelight moved across the snow, orange and gold and shadow always shifting, painting the trunks of nearby pines with warmth that flickered and faded and flickered again. The particular sound each kind of wood made when it burned. Pine crackling and spitting tiny sparks, fir hissing softly as the SAP heated and escaped, birch burning clean and steady with barely any sound at all. The way the forest had different kinds of silence. The silence of dawn when the world held its breath and even the wind waited. The silence of midday when the sun filtered through branches and everything rested in the cold light. The silence of deep night when the stars moved overhead and the only sound was the settling of snow on snow, the occasional crack of a branch weighted down beyond what it could hold. They weren't the same, these silences. They each had their own quality, their own presence, their own way of being. He watched a deer move through the trees one afternoon, a doe stepping carefully through the deep snow. She didn't hurry. She stopped often, her ears turning, her dark eyes taking in the forest around her. When she saw Vidar sitting motionless by the fire, she didn't startle. She just looked at him for a long moment, considering. Then she moved on, disappearing into the white maze of trees like she'd never been there at all. Except she had been there, fully there. Her presence had changed something in that moment, made the clearing feel different, made the silence deeper somehow. The mountains in the distance didn't shout. They didn't fill the space with noise. They just stood. And their standing was enough. More than enough. Their presence shaped everything around them. The weather bending around their peaks, the rivers born from their snowmelt, the paths that people and animals walked, winding between their roots. One morning Bidar woke before dawn. The fire had burned down to coals. Odin was sitting by it, wrapped in his cloak, watching the eastern sky begin to pale. Vidar sat up quietly. He didn't speak. He just sat there, watching. The same thing his father was watching. The light came slowly, not all at once, just gradually. Gradually, gradually, the sky shifting from black to deep blue to pale gray to rose to gold. No announcement, no thunder, just light arriving, the way light always arrives, steadily, certainly without needing to explain itself. When the sun finally broke over the mountain ridge, flooding the forest with cold, clear brightness, Odin spoke. Balder's light is the light people see, warm and immediate and beautiful. But there is another kind of light, the kind that comes every morning, whether anyone is watching or not. The kind that doesn't often get noticed. The kind that just is. He turned to look at his son. Stillness isn't absence, Vidar. It's presence without announcement, strength without display. Being without needing to prove your being. Vidar felt something shift inside him, not breaking, not even changing, really. Just recognizing. I thought I was supposed to be like them. Why? Because their way seems to matter more. Does it? Or does it just seem louder? They left the forest the next day, but something had changed. Or maybe nothing had changed. Maybe Vidar had just stopped trying to change. They walked back through Midgard, taking a different path this time through valleys where rivers ran under ice, making sounds like distant singing. Through villages where people were quiet in their own ways, tending fires, mending nets, carving wood, weaving cloth. Small steady work. No thunder in it, no brilliant light. Just presence. Just being. In one village an old woman sat outside her house, wrapped in a blanket and watching the sky. Vidar stopped. He didn't say anything. He just stopped and stood there and watched with her. The sky was pale gray, heavy with snow that hadn't fallen yet. A crow called from somewhere beyond the houses. Smoke rose from chimneys, straight up in the still air. After a while she smiled. Not at him, just at the sky, at the morning, at being there. Cold today, she said. Yes, vidar said. She nodded, satisfied. That was enough conversation. They stood together in silence for a while longer. Not uncomfortable, not awkward. Just two people watching the same sky, breathing the same cold air, being in the same moment. Then Vidar moved on. He could feel that something had shifted in him, though he couldn't have said what. A recognition. A small opening, like the first crack in ice before the thaw. Later they came upon a small forge at the edge of a village, its door open to let out the heat. Inside, a young man worked at an anvil, shaping a piece of iron. He was making a hinge, simple, functional, the kind that would hold a door for decades if made well. He glanced up as their shadows fell across the doorway, nodded once in greeting, then returned his attention to the work. Vidar and Odin stopped in the doorway to watch. The young man heated the iron in the coals until it glowed orange, then brought it to the anvil. His hammer fell in steady rhythm, not hard, just firm and sure, each strike exactly where it needed to be. The sound rang out clear and bright in the cold air. When the iron had cooled to red, he returned it to the fire, waited, brought it back to the anvil and hammered again, over and over. Heat hammer, check the shape. Heat hammer, check the shape. He didn't rush. When the curve wasn't quite right, he heated it again and made the adjustment. When a corner needed smoothing. He took the time to smooth it. His face showed neither frustration nor satisfaction, just focus, just attention to the work in front of him. Finally he plunged the finished hinge into a bucket of water. It hissed and steamed. He pulled it out, examined it closely, then set it aside with three others exactly like it. Four hinges. Hours of work. They would hold. A door, probably a barn door, and no one would ever think about them. They would just work quietly, doing what hinges do. The young man wiped his hands on his apron and reached for another piece of iron. Vidar found himself thinking about that, the quiet craft in it, the way the blacksmith didn't need the work to be noticed or praised. He'd just made something well because it deserved to be made well. And then he'd started on the next one. No announcement, no expectation of acknowledgment, just the work itself done with complete attention. They stood there until the heat became too much even for gods. Then they nodded to the blacksmith who who nodded back and returned to his fire, and they continued on their way. As they approached the path back to Asgard, Odin stopped at the gate between worlds. I have a question, he said. Vidar wa when you were sitting by the fire those three days, when you were watching the snow fall, listening to the silence, were you less than your brothers then? Vidar thought about it, really thought. No, he said slowly. I was just myself. And was that enough? Vidar looked at his father, looked at his face, weathered and wise and patient. Looked at the way he stood there, not rushing, not pushing, just asking questions and waiting for true answers. Yes, vidar said. It was enough. Odin nodded. The world will ask you many times to be something other than what you are. It will show you your brothers and say, why aren't you like them? It will show you noise and brightness and movement and say, this is what matters. He put his hand on his son's shoulder. But the mountains don't become valleys. The night doesn't try to be day. The silence doesn't apologize for not being thunder. They just are what they are. And the world needs them exactly as they are. Just as it needs you. Vidar returned to Asgard and his brothers, Thor with his hammer and his laughter. Balder with his light and his kindness. The great hall was loud with stories and warmth and the sound of gods being gods. Music played, harps and drums and voices raised in song. The fire in the great hearth roared, sending sparks up toward the high rafters. Platters of food moved from hand to hand. Mead sloshed in horns. Someone was telling a story about a giant and a stolen cow, and the telling involved standing on a table and acting out all the parts. It was bright and loud and full of life, and Vidar didn't try to join them, but he didn't hide either. He simply sat where he always sat, at the edge of the firelight in a chair worn smooth by years of his sitting. He ate in silence. He listened to the stories. He watched the flames dance and the faces around them glow with warmth and wine. And this time he noticed something he'd never noticed before. Between the loud moments, between Thor's thunder laugh and the clatter of cups and the roar of the fire, there were pauses, small spaces of quiet, and in those spaces people breathed, they rested, they gathered themselves for the next bright moment. Someone would finish a story and there would be a beat, just a heartbeat, before the applause. In that beat the room held its breath. A song would end, and before the next one started there was silence. Not empty, full. Full of the echo of what had just been and the anticipation of what would come next. Even Thor, between his great booming laughs and would pause, would take a breath, would look around at the faces of those he loved with an expression that was almost soft. The quiet made room for the loud. The stillness gave the movement somewhere to land. The pauses held the space for everything else to happen in. And he, Vidar, the silent one, he was a part of that. Not less important, not more important, just part of the whole, the way winter is part of the year, the way night is part of the day, the way the rests between notes are part of the music. Later, when the fire had burned lower and some of the gods had wandered off to their own halls, Balder came and sat beside him. For a while neither of them spoke. Then Balder said, you seem different. Vidar considered this. Do I? Quieter somehow, but more present, smiled slightly. I'm exactly the same. Balder looked at him, his beautiful face thoughtful in the firelight. Are you? Yes, vidar said. I just stopped trying not to be. Balder was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded, as if this made perfect sense. That's good, he said simply, and they sat together in comfortable silence, two brothers watching the fire burn down to embers, watching the hall slowly empty, watching the night deepen outside the high windows. It was exactly what Vidar needed. It was exactly what he was. And that was enough. It had always been enough. Time passed, as it always does in the worlds. Vidar grew into himself, into his strength, his silence, his steady presence. He became known in time as the silent God. The one who would endure, the one who would remain when others fell. The one whose strength was not in thunder, but in standing. But that is a story for another night. For now, in this moment, between one year and the next, remember this. You do not have to become something other than what you are. You do not have to fill the room with noise to matter. You do not have to shine like others shine. To be enough. The world needs your particular way of being, your particular stillness, your particular presence. Just as the mountains need to be mountains. And the silence needs to be silence. And the winter night needs to be exactly what it is. Dark and still and full of its own quiet light. You are already what you need to be. You were always enough. Rest well, friend. Good night.