← Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
The Unmapping - A Journey Back to Yourself
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- [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.
- [00:30]
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- [01:32]
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- [02:25]
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It's Eric welcome back to Listen to Sleep. There are moments in life when the path you've been walking simply ends. No cliff edge. No sudden fall. Just a place where the familiar trail runs out and the ground ahead is unmapped. Tonight's story is for anyone who has ever stood in that place. Anyone who has lost something so large that the shape of their own life became unrecognizable. Anyone who has felt, beneath the grief and the fear and the not knowing, the faint pull of something that might be called a new beginning. The unmapping is a story about a woman who follows that pull across an ocean to a small medieval town on a high Spanish plateau where the wind comes from a long ways away and the silence is big enough to hold everything she is carrying. It's a story about the difference between running from your life and running toward it, and about what becomes possible when you pause long enough to feel the ground beneath your feet. Before we begin, if these stories mean something to you, the best way you can keep them coming is to join Listen to Sleep plus over 500 episodes ad free, including eight fulllength classic audiobooks I recorded for you. It's just me up here on the mountain making all of this, and every person who supports the show makes it possible to keep going. You can find the link in the show notes or head to listentosleep.com support thank you. Let's take a deep breath in and out. Just letting go of the day, feeling the weight of gravity pulling you down 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 unmapping the suitcase had two wheels that worked and one that dragged. She had meant to replace it before leaving, but somewhere in the long dismantling of her previous life, the suitcase had simply become a detail she had passed over, and now here she was pulling it through the Madrid bus station at 7 in the morning, with the bad wheel shrieking against the tile, and she was laughing quietly to herself, the way she had not laughed in a long time, because it seemed exactly right. You carry what is broken, you make the noise. You keep moving. She had chosen Almazan from from a map, the way you sometimes choose a word you don't know the meaning of, drawn by its sound, by something about the shape of it. A small city on the Duero in the province of Soria, which she had read was the least populated province in all of Spain, possibly in all of Europe, a fact that had not deterred her but had instead tugged at her heart. She had been surrounded by people for years, by noise, by obligation, by the particular weight of being known in a place where people, being known had started to feel like being held a little too tightly. She wanted space, not metaphorically, physically. She could feel it in her sternum when she thought about the meseta, that high interior plateau, an ancient seabed, treeless and immense, the way her breathing changed the way something in her unclenched grief does, that it can leave you longing for the horizon. She had spent the winter studying Spanish with a retired school teacher named Dolores, who met with her twice weekly over a video call and had no patience for timidity. Again, Dolores would say, and she would say it again, and the language came a little closer each time, not fluent, not even close, but a beginning. She had packed two dictionaries and a notebook she'd already half filled with vocabulary, verb tables and the names of things she did not yet know she would need. The name of the wind, the name of the flowers on the meseta, the way to say I don't understand yet, but I am trying to in a way that was not an apology. Her daughter had driven her to the airport and held her for a long time at the departure store and then stepped back and looked at her with an expression that contained several things at once, worry and love and recognition, the particular look of someone watching another person do the thing they themselves have not yet done. She had carried that look onto the plane and held it during the long dark hours over the Atlantic. She had not cried. She had expected to, had stocked herself with tissues in the seat back pocket, had braced for the specific grief of altitude and departure. Instead she had felt something she could only describe as neutral, not numb, but resting in a place below emotion, below story, in the simple animal fact of a body moving through space toward something it had chosen. Her therapist had talked about this, the way the nervous system sometimes, when the loss has been large enough and long enough, stops narrating and simply carries you. She had learned to trust that carrying she had learned over the past year a great many things she wished she'd known. At 30 the train from Madrid crossed into the meseta an hour outside the city, and she pressed her face toward the window like a child. The land was the color of bread, of dried grass, and it went on and on. She had read about the meseta and thought she understood it, but understanding it from reading was like understanding the ocean from a photograph. The scale was simply not available out here. The sky was not above the land. The sky was the event, and the land was what the sky happened to. Villages appeared and disappeared, clusters of stone the same color as the earth they rose from, so that from a distance the towns looked less built than grown, the landscape folding upward briefly into inhabited shapes before returning to itself. She had not brought anything to read. She had decided this deliberately, had left her book in the overhead bin and sat with her hands in her lap, and watched the land pass. She let her mind do whatever it wanted to do. It wanted mostly to be quiet. Occasionally a thought arrived. I should have packed differently. What if the apartment is terrible? What am I doing? And she watched each one come and and go, the way you watch weather move across a plane. This too was practice. This too was the work she had been doing all year, the slow, unglamorous labor of learning to witness her own mind without being entirely at its mercy. The Tibetans had a word she kept in her chest like a smooth stone rigpa, the awareness that is aware of itself, the ground beneath the weather. She had come to it sideways through grief, which was perhaps the most common path. Loss had stripped away the insulation between her and her own life, had removed the cushioning of routine and plan and the comfortable assumption of a future. In the stripping, she had found beneath everything, this, a quality of presence that was not hers exactly, that did not belong to her history or her personality or her accumulated self, but that was simply there, had always been, there would remain when everything else had changed again. She watched the meseta, and the meseta received her watching with complete indifference, and this indifference was the most restful thing she had felt in a year. The apartment inside the old walls was two rooms and a kitchen with stone floors that held the cold like a kept secret. The woman who handed her the keys, Senora Vera Cruz, small and deliberate with the expression of someone who had long ago decided that small talk was optional, showed her the water heater's temperament and left without ceremony. She stood alone in the apartment with her broken wheeled suitcase, and the silence settled around her like something physical, and she stood inside it and breathed. Outside the kitchen window a narrow street curved away between old walls. A gray cat sat on a ledge and regarded her with total indifference. The morning light came in at a low angle and lay across the stone floor in a single bar of amber, moving almost imperceptibly as the sun climbed. She sat down on the cold stone floor in her coat, and she breathed, and she let the quiet do what quiet does when you finally stop fighting it. The apartment smelled of old stone and something faintly resinous, pine or cedar, some wood she couldn't place. From somewhere outside came the sound of a shop bell or a bicycle, and then nothing, and then the wind, low and steady, the sound the meseta made as it breathed, and she thought, I am finally here. The meseta in April was something older than pretty. On her first morning she walked out through the Puerta de herreros, the gate in the old wall, worn smooth by six centuries of hands, and followed the path down to the river. And the wind came at her, clean and cold and enormous, a wind that seemed to have been traveling for a very long time across a wide nothing and had arrived here at her face, still carrying the memory of all that distance. She stood on the bank of the Duero and let it come. The water was low and cold and seemed to move with a quiet urgency. The poplars along the bank were barely greening, just the first tentative suggestion of leaves. She had brought nothing with her, no phone, no journal, no task. This was the practice she had built over the past year, the deliberate choosing of presence over documentation, of experience over its record. She walked for two hours along the river path and then up through the scrub above the town and out onto the open meseta where the wind strengthened and the land opened in every direction. There were no trees, there was no shade. There was only the earth and the sky and the light moving across both with a slowness that made time feel different, longer, older, less pressured by the human need to fill it. She had spent so many years filling time, filling it with work and worry and the management of things, filling it with a busyness that she understood now had been, at least in part, a way of not feeling what was underneath the busyness. The loss had ended that. The loss had taken a great deal from her and had also, in the way that only those kind of things can, removed her ability to use distraction. The way she had used it had stripped her down to the sensation of being alive, which was both more painful and more vivid than anything she had experienced since childhood. She had started meditating out of desperation, had sat on the floor of her bathroom at 3am in the first weeks because it was the only thing that helped, that gave her a place to put her attention. That wasn't the story of the grief itself. Yet the grief was still there, but underneath the grief, or around it, or somehow simultaneously occupying the same space, a stillness, a ground, the thing that had not been broken because it could not be broken. She stood on the meseta until her eyes ached with the distance, and then she turned and walked back toward the walls of the old town, which from this angle looked very small and very old and very human against the enormous, indifferent sky. She loved it immediately and completely. She would spend months understanding why. This was when she began to discover that she had not entirely known what she was coming for. She had come for the sparsity she had found it. The land gave her that, freely, gave her wind and silence and the specific solitude that is not loneliness but its opposite, the solitude that is spacious rather than contracting, that opens you rather than closes you. But the town itself was something she had not accounted for. She had imagined disappearing into it, had imagined being a foreign woman of no particular story, moving through the market and the bakery and the side streets, unnoticed, anonymous, free of the exhaustion of being known. What she had not imagined was Pilar. Pilar ran the bread shop on the Calle Mayor with the energy of someone who had designated herself personally responsible for the nutritional well being of the entire town, and she had been identified by Pilar on on her second visit, with the precision of a woman who notices things. She had been standing at the counter working out how to ask for a smaller loaf. Her Spanish was functional, but her confidence lagged behind her vocabulary, a gap she was learning to close, one embarrassing exchange at a time when Pilar had simply switched to slow, clear, patient Spanish, the Spanish you use with children and foreigners, not unkindly but with a total lack of pretense, the way you'd hand someone an umbrella in the rain without making anything of it. She eventually fumbled through her request, and Pilar handed her the bread and then a small package of cookies wrapped in paper and said they were for la Casa Nueva, the new house, and wouldn't hear anything about paying. She had walked home holding the bread and the small wrapped cookies and cried for the first time since leaving. It happened like that, in increments, quietly. The warmth of the place did not announce itself or arrive all at once in the manner of a welcome. It came in accumulations too small to narrate as they were happening, which meant you only understood them. Looking back. The old men at the restaurant near the plaza began to nod at her in the mornings. The woman who sold vegetables at the Saturday market began setting aside the good tomatoes when she saw her coming, not mentioning it, just passing them across with a look that suggested this was simply how things were now. The neighbor across the narrow street, a man of perhaps 70 who seemed to spend a significant portion of each day standing in his doorway observing the comings and goings of the Calle, began leaving small things on her doorstep without explanation, a bag of lemons, a cutting of fresh rosemary. She began to understand that the town had its own way of receiving people, which was not the enthusiastic American way, not the immediate and almost aggressive friendliness of new beginnings she had known at home. It was slower, it happened in peripheral vision, this welcome in small gestures that accumulated over time into something that felt one morning unmistakably like belonging. She had not expected to be received. She understood in retrospect, that she had been so deep in the contraction of grief, the way loss makes everything smaller, the world, the future, the sense of what is possible, that she had not imagined herself as someone still capable of being received, of mattering in the small and daily sense to anyone new. She had come for solitude and received it, and was grateful. But solitude, it turned out, was not the destination. It was the preparation, the clearing, the empty room that something else eventually walks into. Spring deepened on the meseta slowly and then with a sudden generosity, as though the land had been withholding, and then decided all at once to give. The wildflowers appeared along the river path. Small purple things she learned, were called tomio, white flowers in the rocky soil she couldn't name, something yellow and persistent in the cracks of the old stone that she eventually identified as a kind of stone crop, a plant that had apparently decided that impossible conditions were simply a matter of perspective. She had started to paint. One morning she had stopped into a small art supply shop near the church and walked out with watercolors and a cheap pad, and three hours later she was sitting on the path above the river, making a bad painting of the poplars in their new green, and the badness was entirely irrelevant. The making was the thing, the quality of attention required to look at something long enough to try to share it, the particular silver green of the new leaves, the exact way the light broke on the moving water, the color of the stone walls at the hour before sunset when they went from ochre to something deeper, something that had no name in English and that she was slowly learning to see rather than translate. That quality of attention was the same quality she sought in her morning sits on the cold floor, in her long walks on the meseta, in the evenings, when she sat in the plaza and let the light change around her without needing to capture it. She thought sometimes about the person she had been two years ago, three years ago, the woman so deep in the project of her own life that she had stopped feeling it, the woman who had confused the schedule with the living. Grief had cracked that open, had removed the insulation between her and the raw sensation of being alive. She was not grateful for the loss. Some things break you, and the breaking is simply terrible and no meaning is required of it. But she was. In some quiet way she was still learning to hold, grateful for where the breaking had brought her, grateful for the cold floor and the amber light and the bad wheel on the suitcase and Pilar's cookies and the man across the street with his simple gifts of lemons and rosemary, grateful to be here, alive and bewildered and beginning on a morning in late May, she went to the Saturday market and moved through the stalls slowly, without a list, letting life decide what it wanted to give her. She bought tomatoes from the woman who saved the good ones for her. She bought a piece of aged manchego and a bottle of the local wine. She bought a bunch of purple wildflowers. Tomio time. She knew its name now and walked back home to set the things on the kitchen table and stand in the morning light. She felt herself clearly and without trauma inside her life, not observing it from a careful distance, not managing it or maintaining it or trying to make it into something she could explain inside it the cold stone under her feet and the smell of time and the light moving across the floor in its slow daily arc, and the town outside the window going about the ancient ordinary business of being itself. The gray cat was on the ledge again. It looked at her with the same expression and it always had total equanimity in the face of everything. It seemed to be either enlightenment or indifference, and she had stopped being sure there was a difference. She opened the window. The morning came in, the smell of it, the temperature of it, the sound of the street beginning its day, and she stood in the opening and breathed it and felt the thread of her life, the long complicated thread of it running back through everything she had lost and everything she had left and arriving here in this room, in this body, on this particular morning in May. The thread did not end here. That was the thing she hadn't expected to feel. She had arrived here as a kind of ending, a stopping, a place to be still after so much motion, and it was that, but it was also, and she could feel this now with clarity, a beginning, the kind that is already quietly underway. She put the time in a glass of water on the windowsill. She made herself a coffee. She sat down at the table and opened her notebook to a clean page, and for a long time she didn't write anything, just sat with the pen in her hand and the light changing and the morning doing what mornings do here, which is to take their time, which is to move through the world without apology, which is to be enough. Rest well, friend. Good night.