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Transcript

Muggle Tales: a muggle hour of soft rest · Muggle Snuggle: A Boring Harry Potter Podcast to make you Sleep

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Been full of, the deep, slow, warm certainty that you
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: are not alone, that you have never been alone, that
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: the universe is holding you the way the library holds
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: its books, gently, carefully, with a reverence that comes not
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: from awe but from tenderness. That is the story of
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: the book, without a name, she says. That is the
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: story of how the library began. That is the story
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: that the library tells over and over in every book,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: on every shelf, in every corner and corridor and room,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: the story of being held, the story of being known,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: the story of being part of something vast and ancient
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: and kind. She closes the book. She places it back
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: in her hands. She looks at you once more, and
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: in her eyes you see the whole library. Every shelf,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: every book, every candle, every sleeping portrait, every warm stone,
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: every curve of every corridor, reflected, like a world inside
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: a snow globe, like a dream inside a sleeper's mind,
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: like a story inside a book. Now, she says, It
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: is time to sleep. Not because the story is over.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: The story is never over. But because sleep is part
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: of the story. Sleep is the part where the story
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: settles into you. Where it becomes part of you. Where
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: it stops being something you are hearing and starts being
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: something you are. The story of being held. The story
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: of being known. the story of being part of something
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: vast and ancient and kind. These are not stories you hear.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: These are stories you are. And the library of dreams
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: is not a place you visit. It is a place
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: you are, always, even when you are not here, even
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: when you are awake. Even when you are in the
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: middle of a busy day, in a loud room, surrounded
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: by people who do not know that they are part
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: of a story, you are part of a story. You
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: have always been part of a story. And the story
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: is a good one. And the story is a kind one.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: And the story will be there, waiting for you, whenever
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: you are ready to come back. Sleep now. The library
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: will keep watch. The books will keep dreaming. The librarian
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: will keep her candle burning. And when you wake, whenever
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: that is, wherever that is, in a bed or in
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: a chair or in a train or in a field
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: of grass, you will carry the story with you. The
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: way the child carried the book, gently, carefully, close to
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: your heart. You are asleep now, or nearly so, and
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: the library knows it. It knows the way a library
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: knows everything. Not through observation, not through attention, but through
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: that quiet, pervasive awareness that libraries have, the awareness of
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: the spaces between the shelves, the awareness of the air
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: between the pages, the awareness of the silence between the words.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: The library knows you are asleep. and it adjusts. It
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: dims the candles, it softens the light. It lets the
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: warmth deepen and thicken until it is not just warmth
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: but presence, the presence of a room that is holding you.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: The way the librarian held the book, gently, carefully, with
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: a reverence that is indistinguishable from love. In your sleep,
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: you begin to walk. Not the kind of walking you
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: do when you are awake, the purposeful, directed, destination-oriented walking
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: that takes you from here to there, from this room
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: to that room, from this part of your life to
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: the next. This is the other kind of walking. The
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: kind that has no destination. The kind that is not
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: going anywhere but is simply going, one step after another,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: one breath after another. one moment after another, with no
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: goal except the walking itself, no purpose except the being there,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: no direction except forward, which is the only direction that
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: sleep knows. You walk through corridors that do not exist
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: in the waking castle. They are too narrow, too winding.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: too full of unexpected corners and sudden openings and doors
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: that appear and disappear as you approach them. The walls
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: are stone, as all castle walls are stone, but this
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: stone is different. It is soft. Not soft to the touch.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: It is still hard, still cold, still solid. But soft
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: in the way that dreams are soft. In the way
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: that the edges of things are soft when you are
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: not quite looking at them, in the way that the
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: world becomes soft when you stop insisting that it be sharp.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: The corridors are lit by candles, as all library corridors
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: are lit by candles, but these candles burn in colors
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: that do not exist in the waking world, a deep,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: impossible violet that is the color of the space between stars,
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: a soft, living green that is the color of the
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: space between leaves. a pale, luminous gold, that is the
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: color of the space between one thought and the next.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: These are the colors of the spaces between things, the
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: colors of the pauses, the colors of the silences, and
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: they are beautiful in a way that the colors of
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: things themselves are not, because they are the colors of potential,
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: of possibility, of everything that could be but has not
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: yet become. You walk past doors. Behind each door, a
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: dream is happening. You cannot see the dreams. The doors
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: are closed. And even if they were open, dreams are
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: not the kind of thing you can see from the outside.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: But you can feel them. You can feel the warmth
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: of the dreams seeping through the wood, through the stone,
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: through the air. You can feel the quiet intensity of
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: the dreamers, their deep, focused attention on the worlds they
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: are building, moment by moment, in the slow, patient way
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: that dreams are built, not with blueprints or plans but
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: with feeling, with memory, with the raw, unprocessed material of
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: the day, which the sleeping mind takes and turns and
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: shapes and forms into something new, something strange, something that
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: makes sense in a way that waking life never quite does.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: Behind one door, someone is dreaming of a house they
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: lived in as a child. You can tell by the
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: quality of the warmth. It is the warmth of sunlight
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: on a kitchen floor, the warmth of a stove in winter,
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: the warmth of a bed that is too small for
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: an adult but was exactly the right size for a child.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: The dream is full of details that the waking mind
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: has forgotten but the sleeping mind has kept. The particular
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: creak of the third stair, the smell of the cupboard
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: under the sink, the way the light fell through the
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: curtains at four o'clock in the afternoon, turning the dust
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: motes into gold. Behind another door, someone is dreaming of
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: a person they loved. The warmth here is different. Warmer, deeper,
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: more complex, with undertones of sadness and longing that are
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: not unpleasant but are real. The way the warmth of
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: a fire is real, with its heat and its light
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: and its inevitable, necessary ash. The dream is a memory,
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: but not the kind of memory you have when you
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: are awake, which is sharp and clear and precise. This
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: memory is soft, and blurred and warm. The way of
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: photographs softens and blurs when you leave it in the sun.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: The way of voice softens and blurs when you hear
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: it from a great distance. The person in the dream
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: is not quite the person they were in life. They
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: are better. They are kinder. They are the version of
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: themselves that the dreamer loved most, preserved in the amber
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: of sleep, protected from the wear and tear of time
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: and disappointment and the slow, inevitable erosion of knowing someone
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: too well. Behind another door, someone is dreaming of a
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: place they have never been. This is the most remarkable
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: kind of dream, the dream that creates rather than remembers,
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: the dream that builds rather than rebuilds. the dream that
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: takes the raw material of the imagination and turns it
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: into something entirely new. The warmth here is different again.