← Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
Listen To Sleep - Quiet Bedtime Stories & Meditations
The View from the Loft - A Day Watched from One Window
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- [00:01]
A
Hey, it's Eric. Before we begin tonight's episode, just a quick reminder. You're about to hear a few ads that help to support Listen to Sleep. If you'd rather drift off without them, you can join Listen to Sleep plus and get every episode ad free, plus bonus stories and meditations. Just go to ListenToSleep.com and click on Support to learn more.
- [00:29]
B
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.
- [00:37]
C
And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball. But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
- [00:41]
B
And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Stephen here has not read Mistborn before.
- [00:50]
C
That's right.
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B
Hey hey.
- [00:51]
C
So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chapter.
- [00:55]
B
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.
- [01:02]
C
News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday and you can find Fantasy Fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts. For delicious meals, you could go out to eat, or you could just make a Marie Callender's meal. Marie Callender's classic chicken Parmigiano bowl is so good. It has marinara sauce that's made from scratch and creamy mozzarella cheese over pasta. It's delicious with no artificial flavors, colors or preservatives and 30 grams of protein. You can find it in the frozen aisle. Marie what having it all tastes like
- [01:36]
A
Acast powers the world's best podcasts.
- [01:40]
B
Here's a show that we recommend.
- [01:45]
D
Hi, this is Zibby Owens, host of Totally Booked with Zibi, formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books in my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest or rated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to stay in the know. Get insider insights and connect with guests like Grammy Award winning singer Alicia Keys, critically acclaimed author Judy Blume, and Academy Award winning screenwriter John Irving every single day with Totally Booked, you aren't just listening, you're part of the story. So don't miss out. Follow Totally Booked with Zibby on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you're listening now.
- [02:38]
A
Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. Hello friend, it's Eric. Welcome back to Listen to Sleep, where ancient wisdom meets deep Rest Spring is just beginning to arrive here on the mountain. Wildflowers are starting to pop up and the creek is a beautiful gray green color that it only gets around this time of year, and in the mornings there's still that cold edge to the air. But the light is different now. It's staying longer too. So tonight's story is about that. About light returning. Not the dramatic kind, not the sudden kind, just the slow, patient kind that happens every day, whether anyone is watching or not. The ridge catching the first gold of dawn. The creek carrying the afternoon in its current. The stars arriving one by one in the dark. Tonight we're going to sit at one window from before first light all the way back to darkness again. Just being with the ridge, the creek, the turning light watching slowly enough that the ordinary becomes something else entirely. Let your only work tonight be noticing before we get started. Just a quick reminder, if you're enjoying these stories and want to support the podcast, you can do that by joining Listen to Sleep Plus. That gives you access to over 500 episodes, all AD free and includes bonus episodes and early releases. Your support really does make 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 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 view from the loft There is a window that faces east toward the creek and the ridge beyond. From the loft of a cabin in the Northern California mountains, this window has framed the same view for years. The same ridge, the same water moving through the same rocks and sand below, the same sky arching over everything. And yet this view has never been the same twice before. Light the window offers almost nothing to the eye. Or perhaps it offers everything the eye cannot yet receive. The ridge is a dark line. Not black exactly, something between black and charcoal, a shade that has no precise name. The sky above it is the same darkness, only very slightly less so. If you were to explain the difference to someone you might fail. And yet the ridge is there. The line holds. You can feel the edge of the world even when you cannot see it. The creek is invisible. But the creek is not absent. It speaks from below, from the near darkness, the sound that is half pouring and half whispering. Water moving over stones it knows by touch. After years of passage, the same stones turned the same way in the same current. And still the water sounds new. A steady rushing at the narrow place where the channel pinches between two banks. A quieter spreading where it widens around the fallen oak that came down two winters ago. The sounds arrive separately, then, together. A layered voice from below the window. In these minutes before first light, listening replaces seeing entirely. The ears open in a different way when the eyes have nothing to do. Three notes from the dark. High, lower, lower. A pygmy owl calling from somewhere in the Douglas firs before there is enough light to know which tree. Then silence. Then the same three notes again, identically spaced, as if testing whether the world is listening. A pause. And then from a different direction, from somewhere along the ridge line or perhaps the upper slope. An answer in the same three notes, or close enough to the same. The ear tries to decide if it's another bird or an echo, and cannot. Stars still the sky above the ridge. Dark blue now rather than black. Or perhaps it has been dark blue for some time, and only now can you tell the difference between black and blue, black and dark blue. This is what pre dawn teaches. And the ridge holds its line, the dark line of it against the slightly lighter dark of the sky. A place between earth and air that has existed here since long before any window, before any watching eye. A slight shift, not in the ridge, not in the creek, in the quality of the sky. Something has changed by a degree too small to name, and yet, unmistakably, the sky above the ridge is no longer the same shade it was just three minutes ago. There's a waiting quality of this hour. You cannot say you have seen anything, only that you have looked. Then it begins at the top. First light touches the highest point of the ridge, the very crest, a jagged line of rock and fir tips. And the change is this. Those dark shapes gain an edge, a rim of something warmer than the surrounding dark, not gold, yet something before gold, a color that hasn't been named, perhaps because most people are asleep. When it appears, the light does not rush. It moves down the slope the way water would if water moved upward into emptiness, filling in the shapes of things from above. Twenty minutes, perhaps, from the first rim of Color on the ridge top to the moment light reaches the creek below. 20 minutes in which you can watch the world be revealed. The Douglas firs appear first, the tallest ones on the upper ridge by the old homestead. Three of them in a loose cluster, one shorter than the other two. This has always been true, will continue to be true, all three leaning slightly east from decades of prevailing west wind. Their silhouettes sharpen before they have color. Then color comes, the dark green that fur needles carry even in winter, deep and almost black in shadow, alive with warmth in direct light. Below the firs, the oaks, the live oaks, are rounded, different from the firs in every way. Where the firs point, the oaks spread. Where the firs are dense, the oaks allow sky between their branches. Their leaves are smaller, lighter in shade, and in morning light they catch and scatter differently than the fir boughs. There is a grove of them partway down the slope, and they emerge from the darkness in their rounded shapes, one by one as the light descends. The sky above the ridge has gone through several colors by now and will go through several more. Dark blue to something gray, blue. A warmth begins to enter the gray, and then, in a moment that seems to happen all at once. And even though it has been arriving for an hour, gold, true gold. The ridge in morning light. Amber, warm, the color of old wood or tea, held up to sunlight. The three FIRs in their gold, the oaks in gold and shadow. And then, finally, the creek. Morning light catches moving water in a particular way that still water does not know. A riffle where the current quickens over shallower stones, throws off light in tiny flashes, not a steady shine, but a constant flickering, the way a tree full of birds moves. The light on the creek is alive in the same way the creek is alive. Never still, never the same shape twice, never repeated. From the loft window, the creek is not fully visible. It appears in glimpses through the willows and bay laurels that crowd its banks, then disappears behind a bend, then reappears in a wider section below the alders. What you see is more suggestion than full disclosure, which may be part of why it is so compelling. The mind fills in what the eye cannot reach, and there is bird song now from everywhere. The mountain chickadees started at first light and are joined by others. A steller's jay lands in the nearest oak and announces its arrival, a sound that is half call and half complaint. From somewhere close to the creek, the acorn woodpecker's laughing call. The sound of it almost ridiculous. The transformation from listening to Seeing is complete. The world is visible again. The window holds its frame, and within the frame, everything. By full morning, the light has settled in to its daily work. The angle is still low enough that shadows fall long across the slope, reaching west from every tree, every shrub, every stone. These shadows are the morning's map. They reveal the terrain in a way that flat midday light never will. You can read the hillside in its shadows, see the dips and rises, the outcroppings, the places where the soil has slipped and new growth is claiming the opening. The three Douglas firs on the upper ridge. The shadows reach down the slope, perhaps twice the height of the trees themselves. The shortest fir casts a shadow that ends just before a shelf of gray rock, a fact that you have not consciously noted before, but which seems, now that you see it, to have always been true. The rock is there, part way down, emerging from the slope like a thought interrupting a long sentence. Below the firs, the live oaks have a different relationship with morning light. Where the firs stand still, truly still, their massive bowls not moving even in the wind that sways their tops, the oaks are in constant small conversation. Their branches lift, their leaves shift, each one catching light at a slightly different angle from the one beside it, so that the grove seems to shimmer without quite moving. A collective conversation too quiet to hear. The creek in full morning, less dramatic than at dawn, but more itself. The light no longer catches it in gold. It returns to its actual color, which is no single color, but a combination of the greenish gray of the bay laurels reflected on its surface, the blue sky where it widens and the canopy opens, the multicolored rocks and pebbles of the stream bed visible through the shallower riffles. A moving transparency. A window. Within the window, a gray squirrel descends from the nearest oak in a series of definitive jumps, not tentative, not exploratory. Each jump placed with the squirrel's characteristic certainty and crosses the open ground below the window, pauses, sits up to survey what it has crossed, then continues into the willows at the creek's edge, and is gone. The whole passage lasts perhaps 40 seconds and leaves no trace. Clouds move left to right across the ridge, eastward, carried by the prevailing flow. Small cumulus clouds, winter clouds, the gray white of creek foam. They cast shadows that cross the ridge and the slope in patterns that are never repeated. A darkening here, a return to brightness there. The hill changing character every few minutes without changing its form. This is the ordinary magic of full visibility. The mountain in its full self, every tree in its place. The jay calling from the Oak, the squirrel drinking from the creek, always moving. The sun has moved directly overhead. The shadows are the shortest they'll be all day. Midday light is flat, direct. The shadows underneath everything rather than beside it. The ridge loses some of its drama. The features that shadow carved into it in the morning have been erased, rock and tree and sky. The creek at midday is the brightest. It will be direct overhead. Sun catches the riffles and turns them almost white. A red tail hawk crosses the frame, riding a thermal, its wings held in a slight V, tilting as it circles, circling as it rises, visible for two minutes before it has climbed beyond the window's frame. There is a quality of stillness that settles over everything. The birds go quiet in the midday hours, or most of them do. The creek continues regardless. The firs stand as they always stand, but the small movements, the squirrels, the jays, the flicker of smaller birds through the understory. These slow or pause. The deer that move freely at dawn and dusk have found their shade somewhere on the north facing slope and will not return to the open ground until the light has shifted. And then nothing changes for a while. The light holds. The creek continues. A cloud passes across the sun and the slope darkens briefly, then brightens again. A butterfly, a small one, pale yellow, crosses the open air below the window, moving south, not in a straight line, but in the butterfly's characteristic wandering path. An apparent carelessness that may be something else entirely. It passes through the frame and out of it. And the frame is as it was before. The fullness of this hour, the completeness of the scene at rest and without marking exactly when the light has changed. The angle has shifted. The sun has moved enough that the shadows have reappeared, but from a different direction, now falling east instead of west. The trees cast their shadows back toward the hill they stand on. And this reversal changes everything. The same firs, the same oaks, the same stones, but the shadows falling differently, the faces of things presented differently to the light. The ridge begins to glow. This is the particular quality of afternoon on a west facing slope. And the far ridge faces west, takes the afternoon sun full on. A warming that begins subtly around three in the afternoon and builds through the hours that follow. Not yet the deep amber of the golden hour, but something preparing itself. A gradual shift in the color temperature of the light that touches rock and bark and dry grass. The creek enters afternoon shade before the ridge does. By mid afternoon, the sun has moved enough that the willows and bays along its banks cover it in shadows. The water changes. No longer bright with direct reflection, it becomes darker, more itself the green gray of its actual color visible without the interference of glare. The sound of it seems to rise slightly when the light withdraws. Or perhaps the ear simply attends more carefully when the eye has less to hold it. A deer steps from the tree line on the lower slope. Then another, then a third, smaller. They move in that considered way. Deer have a step, a pause, a scan across the open ground, heading toward the creek. The first deer descends the bank and disappears. The second follows the young one, pauses at the bank's edge, looks back toward the trees, then follows. The afternoon passes through itself, not hurrying. The shadows grow. The light deepens. Now the window earns its full attention. The sun touches the ridge, not metaphorically, not approximately in this hour. The low sun strikes the rock face, and the upper fir boughs at an angle so directly, so full, that everything it touches seems to hold the light rather than merely reflect it. The three Douglas firs become amber gold at their crowns, the whole upper tree transformed into something burning without fire. The live oaks below them catch the light in their own way, the smaller leaves throwing off a warmer, more scattered gold, a shimmer that is different from the fir's steadier glow and the ridge itself. The outcroppings of gray rock are now deep orange, amber, every small feature emphasized by the raking light, each crack, each lichen patch. There are long shadows now reaching east across the slope. The shelf of rock below the three firs throws a shadow that covers the ground below it entirely, a darkness in the warm light, and within that darkness, the details vanish. You can see only that something is there, a shape, a stone, a suggestion of the slope continuing. The creek is now in the full shadow of the western ridge, but glows with the reflected pink and amber of the sky above it. A pool where the water calms and spreads. In this pool, the whole western sky is held orange at the bottom, which is the top, fading up to gold, fading further to the pale blue gray that the zenith will become. The creek, carrying the sky inside it swallows, cut through the cooling air above the drainage in their fast tilting flight. 3 visible at once, then 5, then 3 again. Their appearance marks the hour as certainly as a clock. The deer that went to the creek have returned to the open slope. They browse in the deep golden light, their red brown coats part of the color of the evening. They do not hurry. They eat. They lift their heads, turn their ears, lower their heads again, colors intensifying before they fade. This is the gift of the last 20 minutes before full dusk. The ridge is all Amber now the firs are dark against a sky that has gone from gold to pink to a particular rose, gray at the horizon. Above that, the blue deepens. The first star, or what appears to be a star, more likely a planet, steady and bright while the sky around it still holds light. The seeing becomes listening again. Slowly, without announcement. The swallows have gone. The deer have moved back to the tree line. The jay has made a last declaration from the oak. The pygmy owl's three notes come once more from the direction of the firs. The bird itself invisible. The firs, only dark shapes, their gold now gone. The ridge is a dark line again. The sky moves without hurrying pink to rose to the deep blue purple of early dusk. More stars pierce through two of them, then three, then too many to count as the sky truly darkens. And in it the ridge line once more a shape understood by feel rather than sight. And the creek below. Invisible speaking. The window frames darkness, and the darkness is complete. On a clear night there are more stars than can be counted. The ridge line below them is only known, not seen. The creek sounds from below. The firs, the oaks, the madrone with its smooth red bark, invisible in darkness. All of them still in their places. Where moonlight touches the creek, water catches silver. Distant coyotes, barely audible from the far side of the ridge or perhaps from the valley below. A sound that could be mistaken for wind until it rises in pitch and becomes unmistakably itself. The trees and the rocks and the creek, invisible but still as they have been all day, as they will be when the first light finds them again and begins the whole turning once more. There is a window that faces east toward the creek and the ridge beyond. From any window a world. The invitation is the same. To look and to keep looking and to notice that looking changes nothing except the one who looks. The creek does not need to be watched to flow. The ridge does not hold itself differently under observation. Rest well, friend. Good night.