← Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
The Nightboat of Nanna - A Gentle Journey of Drifting Off
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- [00:01]
Eric
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]
Boost Mobile Representative
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- [00:35]
Eric
Wait, we're going on tour?
- [00:36]
Boost Mobile Representative
Not a tour. We're delivering and setting up customers phones so it's easier to upgrade.
- [00:40]
Eric
Let's get in the tour bus and hit the road.
- [00:42]
Boost Mobile Representative
No, not a tour bus. It's a regular car we use to deliver and set up customers phones at home or work.
- [00:47]
Eric
Are you a groupie on this tour?
- [00:48]
Boost Mobile Representative
We deliver and set up phones. It's not a tour.
- [00:50]
Eric
Oh you're definitely a groupie.
- [00:52]
Boost Mobile Representative
Introducing Store to door Switch and get a new device with expert setup and delivery wherever you're at.
- [00:57]
Eric
Delivery available for for select devices purchased@boostmobile.com
- [01:00]
T Mobile/US Cellular Announcer
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- [01:20]
Verizon Plan Disclaimer Voice
Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits plan features in Texas and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines.
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Boost Mobile Plan Advertiser
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- [01:48]
Eric
Hello friend, It's Eric. Welcome back to Listen to Sleep, where ancient wisdom meets deep Rest. Well, this week it snowed up here on the mountain, and as it was coming down, Bode and Joey and I took a walk through the forest and just watched while everything got quiet in the way that it really only does when snow is falling. There's something about that kind of quiet that feels very old, like the world remembering something it knew before we arrived. And then we'd get to the waterfalls or the creek and find ourselves immersed in the timeless sounds of moving water. Well, that evening we watched a documentary about the people who lived 5,000 years ago in a land between two rivers, ancient Sumer in what is now Iraq. They built the first cities, they dug the first canals, they gave the garden its first written name. And at night, when their work was done, they also walked by the water, out under more stars than most of us have ever seen. And they told stories about the moon. Well, tonight's story is one of those, or as close as I can get. It's called the Night Boat of Nanna and I hope it carries you somewhere restful. Before we get started, just a quick word to remind you that if you're enjoying these stories and you want to support what I do here, you can do that by joining Listen to Sleep plus and you'll get over 500 episodes of the podcast ad free, including bonus episodes and early releases and audiobooks. Your support makes a huge difference and you can learn more about all the great perks supporters get@listentosleep.com support 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. 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 Night boat of Nana 5,000 years ago, in the land between two rivers, people slept under the same stars you are looking at now. They called their land Sumer. It lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates in what is now Iraq, and it was one of the first places on Earth where human beings built cities, wrote things down, and drew canals through the floodplains to make the first gardens. They made their houses from mud brick. They grew barley and dates. They fished the wide rivers with reed nets and cut the marsh grasses that grew thick along the banks and used them for everything. Baskets, boats, the walls of their homes. At night, when the work was done, they looked up. The sky above Sumer was enormous. No city lights to soften it, no haze to thin it. Just the full dark and all the stars at once. More stars than most of us have ever seen. A river of light overhead that mirrored the rivers below. And moving through that sky, night after night, was the moon, which they called Nana and understood not as a rock but as a God, sailing his celestial boat from horizon to horizon while the world below slept. They told stories about that crossing, and those stories are among the oldest we have. This is an old story, older than cities. Listen, and let the words carry you. There was a man who cut reeds. His hands were calloused, his back ached. In the evenings he had people he loved and worries he carried. And a small house made of mud brick that held the warmth of the day long into the night. He lived near the great river. Not the small canals that threaded between the fields, but the wide river, the one that moved with a sound like breathing. The one that carried silt from the mountains all the way to the sea. He had lived beside it his whole life, and still there were mornings when he looked at it and felt something he couldn't name. Something between gratitude and longing, something that made his chest feel wide. On this particular evening, he had worked later than he meant to. The reeds grew thick along the banks and he had been cutting since morning, tying them into bundles, stacking them on the flat boat he used for hauling. It was good work, honest work, the kind that empties the mind and fills the body with a clean tiredness. But he had stayed a bit too long. The sun went down and he was still there. And by the time he finished securing the last bundle and stepped off the boat onto the bank, the sky was already deep. He meant to walk home, but the bank was soft and the grass was cool and his body was so tired. Not a bad kind of tired, not the ragged kind, but the deep kind. The kind that asks you gently to stop. And so he sat down for just a moment, just a moment to rest his back against the earth and look up at the sky. The stars were out now, all of them. He did not know their names, not really. He knew the ones the priests spoke of, the ones that mattered for planting and for flooding, the ones that marked the movements of the gods across the sky. But tonight they all seemed so close. Closer than usual, as if the sky had lowered itself toward the earth, as if the distance between up and down had grown smaller. While he wasn't watching, he watched the river. The river at night is a different river than the river in the day. In the day it is a working river. Boats and noise and the calling of men, nets and fish and reeds and mud. But at night, it becomes what it always was underneath. Just water moving. Just the sound of the world breathing. The surface caught the starlight and held it loosely, the way cupped hands hold water. Not perfectly, just for a moment, just enough, and his eyes grew heavy. He did not mean to sleep, but the grass was cool and the river was breathing. And the stars were very close, and his body knew what it needed even when his mind hadn't decided yet. And so he slept. The first thing he noticed was the sound of water against wood. A slow, rhythmic sound, patient, like something that had been moving for a long time and had no intention of stopping. He became aware of it the way you become aware of your own breathing. It had been there all along. You simply hadn't noticed. He opened his eyes and he was on a boat. Not his boat, not the low, flat hauling boat with its bundles of reeds. This was something else entirely. Long and wide, with curved sides that rose higher than seemed necessary. And a great curved prow at the front that arched up toward the sky like a crescent, like a new moon turned on its side. The wood was dark and smooth, and when he touched it with his hand, it was warm. The way wood gets warm when it has been in the sun for a long time. Though there was no sun here, just the river and the sky and the stars. He sat up slowly. There were others on the boat. He couldn't see them clearly in the darkness. They were shapes, really. Bundled forms, lying on the broad deck, breathing slowly, sleeping, most of them. A woman with her hands folded beneath her cheek. An old man whose beard moved slightly with each exhale. A child curled like a seed. He did not know any of them, but he was not afraid. There was something in the quality of the air on this boat, something that made him feel very far away, like a word in a language you once knew but have mostly forgotten. And at the back of the boat there was a figure, tall, unhurried, standing at the stern with a long pole that he used to guide the boat through the water. The figure did not look at the man, or if he did, the man could not quite see it. The way you can't quite look directly at the moon without your eyes adjusting and adjusting and never quite landing. There was a quality of light around the figure. Not bright, not harsh, just present the way moonlight is present. Diffuse and cool and everywhere at once, touching everything it fell on very gently, and the man understood without being told. This was Nana, the moon God, the shepherd of stars, the one who crossed the sky each night in his great boat of light. And this, this wide, dark river with its sleeping passengers. This was that crossing, and he had been invited. Not as a special thing, not as a chosen one, not because of anything he had done or not done, simply because he had fallen asleep on the bank and the boat had come the way the boat always comes every night to Everyone who lets themselves stop. So he lay back down. The deck was smooth beneath him and the sky was very large above. And the boat moved with a steadiness that felt like being held. They came to the first bend in the river. He felt it before he saw it. A slight shift in the current, a gentle turning. The stars overhead rearranging themselves slowly as the boat changed course. The river curved to the left around a wide bank of pale sand. And as they moved around the bend, he felt something leave him. It was the sound of the day. He hadn't realized he was still carrying it. The voices, the noise. The scrape of the cutting blade against the reeds. The calling of the other workers across the water. The sound of the city behind him. The cartwheels on the road, the dogs barking somewhere. The thousand small sounds of a life being lived. He had carried all of that sound without knowing it. The way you carry a scent, it gets into everything and you stop noticing it's there until it's gone. And now it was gone. The river was quiet, genuinely quiet. The only sounds were the water against the hull and the slow breathing of the other passengers. And somewhere very far away, the sound of wind moving through reeds. The sound of the world growing still. He breathed out. He hadn't known how loud it had been inside him until the silence came. The second bend came softly. The river curved again, this time to the right, and the stars shifted once more. New arrangements, new patterns, as if the sky was turning its pages. And what left him this time was the weight of the day's small worries. Not the large worries, those he would carry for a while longer. They had more substance to them, but the small ones. Did I do that correctly? Did I cut enough? Did I say the wrong thing to the man at the market? Is the roof holding? Did I remember all the small, nagging voices that run underneath the surface of a day like water under ice? Well, they simply floated away. He watched them go without trying to hold them. He had the feeling he'd had before when setting down a heavy bundle. That brief moment of surprise at your own lightness. The body not quite believing it no longer has to hold what it was holding. And the stars were very bright now. He found himself looking at one in particular. Not because he chose it, but because his eyes landed there and stayed the way eyes do when the mind has nothing left to tell them to do. Just a star, just light. Just a very old thing being itself in the dark. At the third bend, the river widened. The banks fell back on both sides and the water spread out until it felt less like a river and more like a lake, more like a sea, the far shores barely visible in the starlight. The boat moved more slowly here, as if there was less urgency, as if time itself had stretched and softened. What left him at this bend was the body's effort, the tension he had been holding through his shoulders, down his back, in the soles of his feet that had stood on the river bottom all day. He felt it release the way a knot releases when the right thread is pulled, not all at once. Slowly. First the shoulders dropping an inch. He hadn't known they'd risen. Then the jaw unclenching. Then the hands unfolding. Then the long muscles of the back settling, spreading, becoming heavy in the good way, in the way that means the ground is holding you and you don't have to hold yourself. And his breathing slowed. You could count if you wanted. There is no hurry in the rising chest, the belly softening out everything that needed to leave, leaving in the cool night air, the scent of river water, the faint sweetness of the reeds along the distant bank. Out, the figure at the stern moved the pole through the water without effort, without strain. The motion was so practiced that it had become simply a part of the world, like the current itself. The fourth bend came in darkness. The stars had shifted to a part of the sky the man didn't recognize. Or perhaps he simply couldn't find the familiar ones, the ones he used to navigate, the ones the priests named. It didn't matter. He was not navigating. He was a passenger. That was the only thing he was required to be. What left him at this bend was harder to name. It was something like the weight of being known, the accumulated sense of himself that others carried. The reed cutter, the neighbor, the son, the man with the aching back and the small house. All the versions of himself that existed in other people's minds, all the ways he was perceived and measured and remembered. He didn't know he'd been carrying those either, but they were there. The way the scent of smoke stays in clothes, you bring it with you everywhere. And at this bend, gently, without drama, they became less important. Not gone, not dissolved, just quieter, further away, as if seen from a great distance, from a height, from the perspective of the stars themselves, which had been watching for so long that all the small urgencies of identity had become very small indeed. He was still himself, but he was himself more lightly. And once again he closed his eyes. He didn't know how long he had floated between the fourth bend and the Fifth time had changed its quality. It was no longer moving in one direction with urgency and purpose. It was more like the river itself. Present everywhere at once, patient, not going anywhere it wasn't already going. At the fifth bend, there was a sound. Not a loud sound, a low sound, a deep sound, more felt than heard. The way you feel distant thunder in your chest before you hear was coming from everywhere and nowhere. From the water and the sky and the hull of the boat beneath him. A sound like the world's own breathing. A sound like something very large settling into rest. What left him at this bend was the story. The story he told about himself. Not his name that had already grown quiet, but the narrative. The one that ran underneath everything. The one that explained why things had gone the way they'd gone. The one that made sense of the hardships and the choices and the path from there to here. He'd been telling it for so long he'd forgotten it was a story at all. He'd begun to think it was simply the truth. But here, on the river, under the sky, with the low sound moving through everything, it loosened the way a fist loosens in sleep. Not abandoned, not destroyed, just held more loosely. Just recognized, perhaps for the first time, as a thing he was carrying rather than a thing he was. He breathed in, out. He was still here. He was still the man on the boat, on the river, under the stars. But the man was quieter inside than he had been in a very long time. The sixth bend was barely a bend at all. The river curved so gently that he only knew they had turned because the stars moved almost imperceptibly. And there was a new smell in the air. Something cool and mineral, something that suggested great distance. The smell of water that had come from very far away and was going somewhere further still. What left him here was the effort of consciousness itself. The watching, the monitoring. The constant, low level awareness that something might need attention, that something might. Might need a response. That the world was ongoing and required participation. He had been watching for so long. Watching for danger, watching for opportunity. Watching for the needs of the people he loved. Watching himself to make sure he. He was doing it right. And now, on this boat, in this darkness, surrounded by the breathing of the other sleepers and the steady movement of the water, the watching could stop. Nothing was required of him. Not now, not here. The figure at the stern would guide the boat. The river would carry them. The stars would hold their positions in the sky. Everything that needed to keep happening would keep happening without his help. And he let the watching Go. And in the space where the watching had been, there was simply openness, a kind of interior sky, quiet and dark and very large. He floated in it. He was barely thinking now. Thoughts moved through the openness, the way clouds move through the sky, slowly, without urgency, changing shape and not landing anywhere. And the seventh bend was also so gradual he almost didn't notice it. The river had narrowed again, or perhaps widened again. He couldn't tell anymore. The banks were very far away, or perhaps there were no banks. Perhaps it had all become water. Perhaps it had all become sky. Perhaps the boundary between the two had dissolved, the way all boundaries dissolve eventually. The figure at the stern was still there, still moving the pole through the water. Still the same patient, luminous presence that had been there from the beginning. The man wanted to ask where they were going, but the question dissolved before he could form. Didn't matter where they were going. That was the thing he'd been learning all along. Bend by bend, release by release. The going was the thing. The water, the sky, the slow breathing of the other passengers. The sound of the pole moving through the dark water, the coolness of the air on his face. He didn't remember the cutting of the reeds. He didn't remember the tired walk toward the riverbank. He didn't remember sitting down in the grass. He didn't remember the day before that or the one before that. They were there somewhere, he understood. They were there somewhere. But they were very quiet now, the way distant music is quiet. The way something you heard once, a long time ago is quiet, present somewhere in the body without needing to be named or addressed or resolved. He was on the boat. He was on the boat, and the stars were overhead and the river was beneath him. And everything that had needed to be released had been released at each of the seven bends, one by one, gently, without force, the way the river releases the land as it moves toward the sea. He was not the reed cutter now. He was not the neighbor or the son or the man with the aching back. He was not the story or the worry or the wait. He was simply the one who was here, on the water, under the sky, breathing. And Nana's boat moved on through the night, past the sleeping banks, past the dark fields, past the cities where other people were also falling into sleep, one by one, lying down in their warm houses, releasing the day's weight, finding their way to the river in their own way. And the moon God moved his pole through the water, patient, unhurried, going exactly where he was going at exactly the pace he was going the way the night itself goes. Not rushing toward morning. Not clinging to midnight. Just moving. Just being. Just the great slow boat of the hours crossing the sky. The passengers slept. The river carried them. The stars kept their vigil. And somewhere deep in the middle of the night, in the still hours before the birds remember to begin, there was just the water and the sky and the slow breathing of the world. Just this. Just here. Rest well, friend. Good night.