Over the moon -
before you sleep
I’m obsessed with the last hour before sleep. It’s potent.
It feels sacred.
But I have the damnedest time treating it that way.
Honestly… lately… I’ve dissociated for that last hour.
That’s a strong word. But yes, I have.
I’ve been weary. I haven’t known how to stop during the day, how to stop much at all, or calibrate myself so that I don’t careen toward sleep so… stimulated, so reactive. I full-court-press my life in LA - offense and defense - on on on. Then tumble into sleep; then up to sprint again.
You ever get persistent intuitions about your life? Sometimes a background whisper for years, sometimes startling and immediate?
For the past decade, I’ve felt a keen, consistent sense (let’s call it insight), that says:
“If I protect and nurture my final hour before sleep, my whole life will transform.”
Here’s another persistent insight I get:
“More good can grow within you in an hour of sacred rest than in years of hustling.”
Welcome to my mystical mind. Maybe this is all a stretch for you. IDK. These thoughts alight like doves, over and over, from somewhere broader and wilder than my mind, across months and years, gently and steadily recurring.
I rarely act on them.
That’s hard to admit. It’s true.
But when I do finally stop the dissociative train, the consumption onslaught… and unplug and tend to the hour before sleep, when I use it to write my thoughts, hopes, fears, insecurities, and passions, to let my anxiety pass like weather, to unspool all that I yearn for in the world… or when I cry if I need to, or read something that expands me… or when I pray for the people I love (also the people I have a hard time loving), or when I stand in my backyard and gape up at the ink black sky,
I change.
It’s kind of staggering. (As I’m writing this now, I’m like: “No shit, Emily! Why don’t you do this more?” “I don’t know, Em, but I’m about to do it way more.” “Ok, bb. Good.”) If I unplug and tune in for that hour, I sleep deeper, and I wake up… new (??? I can’t find a better word for it. I do feel new). Emotional knots dissolve, I find myself less insecure, less resentful, less harried and miserly with my care. Obstacles shift around, insights flow to me, inner stuff aligns, and I begin to live generously - giving and receiving.
I like THE MATRIX because it’s a film about waking up, about living in reality… clear-eyed. I’ve wanted to “live awake” - obsessively - since childhood, to feel love and care and sacredness and to be aware of suffering and pain and hope, believing that it matters to love well, to have courage, and to do good.
(Sometimes I terrify myself because that desire is so uncomfortable and conflicted, and it’s taken [still is taking] me a long time to be healthier about it. Not masochistic. Not extreme. Not eventually fleeing from myself because it all hurts too much. ANYONE RELATE?)
BUT… My “red pill” (my avenue, my method) for “waking up” is to tend to that 1 hour before sleep, to unplug from all inputs and meditatively open myself to a Love that requires only humility to receive.
The point is that maybe you might want to try this too? With me? … tending to that hour before sleep.
I’ve more to say, but …
(I know this is abrupt)
It’s that time. It’s night. There’s a rare California deluge outside my window. I can hear the enormous drops fall against the glass and splash onto the patio. And I’d like to unplug myself… to wake up and be with it all.
I have 1 hour before I sleep, and I need to use it.
I’ll see you in the morning.
But before I sign off, I hope you find the courage to give this a try too. If so, tell me?
And now - farewell for a night, and here, for you, are the sorts of things I’ll ponder in this hour before sleep:
“Her heart - like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away - was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw.”
-George MacDonald
“I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing.”-David Whyte
“One small thing
I've learned these years,
how to be alone,
and at the edge of aloneness
how to be found by the world.”-David Whyte
“I had lain down under the shadow of a great, ancient beech-tree, that stood on the edge of the field. As I lay, with my eyes closed, I began to listen to the sound of the leaves overhead. At first, they made sweet inarticulate music alone; but, by-and-by, the sound seemed to begin to take shape, and to be gradually moulding itself into words; till, at last, I seemed able to distinguish these (words), half-dissolved in a little ocean of circumfluent tones: “A great good is coming—is coming—is coming to you…” and so over and over again… I fancied that the sound reminded me of the voice of the ancient woman, in the cottage that was four-square. I opened my eyes, and, for a moment, almost believed that I saw her face, with its many wrinkles and its young eyes, looking at me from between two branches of the tree overhead. But when I looked more keenly, I saw only twigs and leaves, and the infinite sky, in tiny spots, gazing through between. Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it... And so, FAREWELL.”
-George MacDonald
🤟🏼