← Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
The Stone and the Luminous Ground - A Tale of Nature Revealing Itself
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A
Hey, it's Eric.
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Before we begin tonight's episode, just a quick reminder. You're about to hear a few ads
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that help to support Listen to Sleep.
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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
- [00:25]
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Support to learn more.
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Howdy, howdy ho, and welcome to Fantasy Fan. Fellas, I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fangirls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson.
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And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
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And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Stephen here has not read Mistborn before.
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D
That's right.
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Hey.
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Hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
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And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, mag explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
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Newsflash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy Fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:09]
E
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Let's be completely honest. Are you happy with your job? The fact is, a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown or one we never really wanted in the first place. But we stick it out and we give reasons. Like what if the next move is worse? And I've put years into this place, and maybe the most common one. Isn't everyone miserable at work? But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry Me. They match you with a certified career coach who helps you get from where you are to where you want to be, either at your existing job or by helping you find a new one. Your coach helps clarify your goals, creates a plan, and keeps you accountable along the way. Go to Strawberry Me Career and get 50% off your first coaching session. That's Strawberry Me Career.
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Hello friend, It's Eric. Welcome back to Listen to Sleep, where ancient wisdom meets Deep Rest. Well, my first book, Awaken your Myth comes out this week.
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I have been sitting with that, with what it means to put something into the world that took years to understand, let alone write. One of the things writing it showed me maybe more than anything else, is
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how deep my own story about not being good enough actually goes.
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I kind of thought I knew it.
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I didn't know the half of it.
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The book cracked something open that I'm
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still sitting with in the best possible way.
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Tonight's story kind of mirrors my own. It's about a woman named Senna and something she's been carrying her whole life, and what she discovers when she finally, just for one night, sets it down. This one is for all of us who carry something we've forgotten isn't actually who we are. And before we begin, if these stories mean something to you, the best way to keep them coming is to Join listen to sleep +500 episodes ad free, including bonus stories and early releases. It's just me up here on the mountain making all of this, and every person who supports the show makes it
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possible to keep going.
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You can find the link in the show notes or head to listentosleep.com support. Let's take a deep breath in
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and out.
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Just letting go of the day, feeling
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the weight of gravity pulling you deep down into the mattress.
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Another deep breath in and out. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to be.
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This is your time. Quiet time. One more deep breath in
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and out. If you get tired while I'm reading
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to you, that's okay. Just let yourself drift off
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the stone and the luminous ground. There is a village at the edge of the known world, not the edge of the map. This is the edge that travelers find only when they have walked past the last road, past the last signpost, past the place where the forest stops being a forest and becomes something older. The village has a name, but the name sounds different depending on who says it and when. In the morning it sounds like water moving over stone. At midday it sounds like the word for home in a language you almost remember. And at night, which is when you
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probably are hearing this, it sounds like nothing at all, Just a hush, just a settling.
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The houses are made of river stone
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and old timber and something else, something pressed into the walls long ago that
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makes them glow faintly at the edges
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when the moon is new.
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The people who live there don't talk
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about the glow, not because it is a secret, but because some things are
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better held than explained. There is a woman who lives at
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the far end of the village, where the houses thin out and the old trees begin. Her name is Senna.
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She has lived in this village for as long as anyone can remember.
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And she carries a stone.
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Not a small stone, not something you would slip into your pocket and forget about.
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This stone is the size of a
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fist, her fist, and it is smooth on one side from years of being
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held, and rough on the other side, the one that faces away from her.
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It is gray and flecked with something
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that catches the light. She has carried it for so long
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that her hand has shaped itself around it. When she sets it down, which is
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rare, her hand looks and feels wrong, incomplete.
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The people of the village know about the stone. Children ask about it when they are young and their parents tell them that
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is Senna's stone she has always had,
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is hers to carry. And the children accept this the way
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children accept most things, completely without needing
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it to make sense. But Senna knows the story of the stone. She has always known it.
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She was given the stone before she could speak. Not by a person, by a feeling.
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By the first morning, she understood that the world had opinions about her and that those opinions were not entirely kind. She had done something. She could never remember what exactly. And someone had looked at her in
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a way that meant not quite right, not quite enough.
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She had reached out and picked up that look and held it. And it had become, over time, the stone. This is how stones are made. Tonight Senna cannot sleep. This is not unusual. She has always slept lightly, the way people sleep when they are holding something they are afraid to put down.
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So she rises from her bed without lighting a lamp. She knows this house by feeling, by the particular sound of each floorboard, by
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the way the cool air pools near
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the window and the warm air rises near the hearth. She wraps herself in a wool blanket, gray and heavy, and she steps outside. The village is asleep. The moon is a thin crescent, barely there, just enough light to show the outlines of things, the edges of rooftops,
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the white stones that line the path,
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the dark mass of the old trees at the end of the lane.
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And Senna walks. She walks the way she always walks
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at night, slowly, without destination, letting her feet find the path. The stone is in her right hand, as always.
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She passes the baker's house, the well, the small shrine at the crossroads where
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someone has left a bowl of salt and a sprig of dried lavender.
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She walks until the houses are behind
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her and the trees are ahead of her, and then she walks into the trees. The forest at night does not frighten
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her,
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not this forest.
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She has walked here for decades.
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She knows the smell of it, pine resin and cold earth and something sweet
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she has never been able to name, something that only blooms this time of
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year and only after dark.
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She knows the sounds, the small shufflings of nocturnal things, the occasional bark of
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a fox far away, the wind moving
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through the canopy like a long, slow
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breath,
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and she walks until she reaches the place she always reaches, eventually.
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A clearing, not large, perhaps 20 paces across.
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The trees stand back from it in a perfect circle, which is strange, which
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has always been strange, but which she stopped asking questions about years ago.
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In the center of the clearing is a flat stone, large enough to sit on, worn smooth on its upper surface by what must be centuries of sitting.
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She sits.
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The stone is cold even through the
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wool blanket, and the cold is good.
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It asks nothing of her.
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She holds her stone, her stone, the one she carries, and she looks up.
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The sky above the clearing is extraordinary. This is the edge of the known world, and out here the sky does not have to compete with anything. No lamp light, no glow from a distant city, just the sky and the stars and the thin crescent moon already beginning to set behind the western trees. The stars are so numerous that the darkness between them seems almost incidental, almost beside the point. Senna has looked at this sky for most of her life, and it still does something to her chest that she doesn't have a word for, A kind of expansion, a kind of ache, as if the sky is asking her to be larger than she knows how to be. And she is trying, she is always trying, but the stone in her hand makes it harder than it might otherwise be.
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She sits for a long time, long enough for the moon to finish setting, long enough for the temperature to drop another degree and then another.
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Long enough for the trees to stop being individual trees and become a single
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dark presence, a circumference, a held breath, and then something happens that has never happened before. A light appears at the center of the clearing. Not from above,
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not a falling star
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or a torch, nothing she can make sense of. It comes from below, from the earth itself, a soft blue white light, the color of the inside of a glacier, rising slowly through the soil. Senna does not move.
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She is afraid a little, but she
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is Also, and this surprises her, not afraid. Both things are true at the same
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time, which is something she has learned
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to hold without needing to resolve. The light gathers itself slowly, patiently, the
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way dawn gathers not a moment but a direction of becoming more than an event. It pools on the surface of the ground.
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It spreads to the edges of the
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clearing, and at the center of the
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light something emerges, a figure, old, ancient even.
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She cannot tell if it is a man or a woman, or something that contains both and neither.
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It wears robes the color of deep water, and its face, when she can
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see it, is the face of someone
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who has been awake for a very long time, not tired, but luminous with
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the particular clarity of someone who has
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passed through exhaustion into something on the other side. The figure looks at Senna, not at her face, at her hand, at the stone. You have carried that for a long time, the figure says.
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Its voice does not travel through the air. It arrives directly, the way understanding arrives.
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Known, not heard. Yes, senna says.
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Her voice sounds strange to her out here in the dark, but she does
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not take it back. Do you know what it is?
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She looks down at the stone, the
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smooth side worn by her palm, the rough side facing away. I know what it became, she says. I don't always remember what it was before.
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The figure inclines its head. This seems to be an answer of some kind, an acknowledgment.
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Would you like to set it down?
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Senna's hand tightens around the stone.
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The reflex is immediate, physical, older than thought.
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She feels the roughness on one side,
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the smoothness on the other.
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She feels the specific weight of it, which she knows, the way she knows the weight of.
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Of her own body, not consciously, just as a fact of being alive.
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I don't know what I would hold,
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she says,
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if I wasn't holding it. The figure moves, not walking but shifting, the way candlelight shifts and sits across from Senna on the cold ground, cross legged and unhurried. The light from the earth continues to rise around them, both, faint and steady.
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That, the figure says, is the right question.
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They sit together in silence for a while. The silence is comfortable. It does not demand anything.
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Tell me about the stone, the figure says finally. Not what it is now, what it was at the beginning.
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And Senna, who has never told this
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story to anyone, tells it.
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She tells it slowly. She tells it the way the light
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is rising without hurry, without knowing exactly where it is going.
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She tells about the first look, the one that started everything, and how small she was, and how a small person receiving a message that they are not
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quite right, has very few choices available to them. She tells about all the times after that, the accumulation, the confirmation, the way the mind finds the evidence it is looking for, the way the stone grew heavier as the years confirmed what the first look had only suggested. I became very good at many things, she says, so that no one could say I wasn't enough, and I never quite believed that it worked. The figure listens, does not offer comfort, does not refute, does not explain,
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just
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listens with the quality of attention that
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is itself a kind of nourishment, the kind you did not know you were
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hungry for until you receive it. And the stone? The figure asks when she is finished. The stone is the part of me that agrees with the first look, Senna says, the part that thinks they were right. The light from the earth is brighter now, not blinding, still soft, still that deep blue white, but so present, filling the clearing, filling the spaces between the trees. Senna looks at her hand, the stone. She turns it over slowly, feeling both sides. What is underneath it? She asks, and she is not exactly sure what she is asking, but the
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figure seems to understand.
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Look, it says, and Senna looks not at the stone but at her hand holding the stone really looks for perhaps the first time,
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at the lines of her palm, at the particular way the skin folds at her knuckles, at the small scar near her thumb from a
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knife that slipped long ago while she was cutting bread, at the way the light from the earth moves across her
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skin and makes it look for a
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moment like the skin is lit from within and something loosens in her chest. It is not a dramatic loosening.
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It is not the kind of release
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that announces itself, more like a seamless giving way, a door that has been slightly open for years, finally resting all the way open. The stone is not wrong, she says. It is just not the whole story. The figure says nothing, but the quality of the silence shifts. There is something underneath the stone, senna says. There has always been something underneath it. The stone didn't cover it, the stone just sat on top of it and I forgot to look.
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She begins to open her hand slowly,
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first just a loosening of the grip, a slight uncurling of the fingers. The stone rests in her open palm, no longer held, just resting. It looks different this way, smaller somehow, less a part of her. The light from the earth moves across
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its surface and she sees for the first time what she had never noticed
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in all her years of holding it. The stone is beautiful, not despite what it is, because of what it is gray and flecked with light, smooth on the side that faced her, rough on the side that faced away. A stone that was made by pressure and time and heat beyond imagining, formed in the dark interior of the earth, carried up through the rock over millions of years, held by her hand. It has its own history, its own long becoming. It is not nothing. It is a stone that holds, if you look at it right, the record of everything it has survived. Oh, senna says. The figure waits. I thought carrying it meant I believed it, she says, that I agreed.
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She is quiet for a long time, but maybe I was just keeping it
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close so it couldn't surprise me.
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She is not entirely sure that this is true, but she is not sure that it is entirely false either. And tonight, in this clearing, in this
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light, she does not need it to be entirely anything.
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She sets the stone down. She places it gently on the flat stone.
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She is sitting on the ancient seat, the worn and patient surface. She places it carefully, smooth side up. Her hand feels so strange, lighter than she knows how to account for. She flexes her fingers slowly. Her palm is warm where the stone was flushed with the return of full circulation. She looks at her open hand. The light from the earth moves across it, and she sees, not with her eyes exactly, but with something behind her eyes, something that was always there and is only now being consulted. She sees what was underneath the stone the whole time. It is not simple. It is not a clean answer. It is more like a vast quiet ground, something that does not need to be proven, something that was there before the first look and will be there after everything she has ever believed about herself has dissolved, reformed and dissolved again. It is warm and cold.
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It is the temperature of the truth, which is both.
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It is the ground of her, the luminous ground.
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She had always thought she would need
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to earn her way to something like this,
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had always thought there were conditions
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she had not yet met stones she had not yet moved, work she had not yet done well enough. But it is not like that. It does not work like that. It was here the whole time, underneath.
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The figure has not moved. It sits across from her in the
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rising light, patient, unhurried, ancient. Does it go away? Senna asks, if I go home and sleep and wake up tomorrow. Does it go away? The stone, the figure says, will be there when you wake up. She looks at the stone resting on the ancient seat. She almost picks it up again, the impulse is so strong and familiar, but she watches it without following it. But so will the ground, the figure says. She looks up you know where it is now, the figure says.
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The light is beginning to soften and settle the way dawn settles after the
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first intensity of it. The clearing is still lit from within, but more gently now. Senna is tired, the good kind, the
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tiredness of someone who has walked a
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long way and arrived somewhere real. She looks at the stone one more time, smooth side up in the moonless light. Can I leave it here tonight? She asks.
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The figure inclines its head.
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Everything may rest here, it says. Senna wraps the wool blanket more tightly around her shoulders. The cold is still there, but it
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is the kind that makes you aware
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of being alive in the most uncomplicated way. Her breath makes small clouds in the air, each breath out a small release, each breath in a return. She will go home soon. She will walk back through the dark forest, past the shrine with its salt and lavender, past the well and the baker's house. She will go inside and remove her
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shoes and lie down in the bed
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she has slept in for most of her life. And she will sleep not perfectly, perhaps
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not even for long.
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The stone will be somewhere in the morning, if not in her hand, then somewhere close.
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Old habits do not dissolve in a single night.
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Old stories do not rewrite themselves in a single clearing.
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But she has set it down
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even once, even here. She has felt what is underneath.
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And she knows now, not as a
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thought but as a ground, that the not enoughness was never the truth. It was a stone, a stone made of real material, yes, a stone forged in real heat, carried through real years. Not nothing, but not the truth either. Underneath it,
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this,
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this quiet, this ground that does not need her to be other than she, is this light rising slowly from the earth. Let your body settle now. Let it find the places where it is held, the weight of the blanket, the surface beneath you, the particular way. Gravity is asking nothing of you tonight except to let it hold you as you rest. And if you are holding something tonight, and most of us are most nights, you do not have to put it down. You don't have to solve it. You don't have to understand it all the way through. You can just let your hand soften a little, just enough to feel the warmth return. The ground is there, underneath everything you carry. It has always been there. You don't have to earn it, you don't even have to find it. You are already resting on it. Let the light rise slowly through you now, the color of the inside of a glacier, the color of the space between one breath and the next. Let it rise. Let it hold you. Let the village at the end of the world fall. Quiet around you. The old trees leaning in the ancient stone. Patient beneath you. The sky overhead full of more stars than darkness. You are seen here you are held. Here you are just as you are. Enough. Rest well, friend. Good night.