Night has been on my mind. I think it’s been making me sensitive to its reference in my reading because it does seem to be floating in snippets lately. Something like the dry corn husks blowing through our yard that interrupts the fields.
Or maybe, something is trying to get my attention. Either way. I’m thinking about night.
“… for centuries Persians, as most residents of Iran were then known, had cultivated detailed and ravishing visions of paradise in their walled gardens, as emblems of – enticements towards—the higher garden that awaits the fortunate.
The Magi who had traveled to Bethlehem to pay their respects to the infant Jesus were often said to have come from Iran. So, too, the very word “magic” and the notion of a star shining above an auspicious birth. The water-softened courtyards that had bewitched me one candlelit evening in the Alhambra, the landscaped gardens depicting paradise around a marble tomb that had transfixed Hiroko and me on our honeymoon, at the Taj Mahal…”
This quote I read several weeks ago stuck with me. It brought to mind the garden in Eva Luna by Isabel Allende. (See my review of that book here.) So many scenes play out or are witnessed from that garden in the night. Cool and dark, with sounds of water that make it a paradise place, a respite from the daytime climate. It’s a sort of source setting for many transformations of story dynamics and individual people in that large portion of the book.
A short time later, I heard Sinéad O’Connor say this in her memoir Rememberings:
“In Islam, we believe that in Heaven it’s always night. I hope so. And I hope if there’s a heaven, I qualify… /… I love fire. I hope there are fires in heaven. Fire makes me strong when I am unable. I also love nighttime best because that’s what fire is for. And if my nighttime has no fire in it, nor my dark morning, I’m bereft, naked even…”
I’ve spent a lot of my life awake at night. My relationship with sleep has been complicated since I was very small. Exposed to adult concerns and left to process alone, I spent most nights awake till all hours, keeping vigil over my parents. It wasn’t safe to sleep if one of them was awake alone. (There was a health condition that could become dire quickly and required monitoring.) If one parent went to bed and this one stayed up… Who would know if they nodded off on the couch? Who would keep watch? I did not trust either parent to be disciplined about this. So, I took it upon myself, creeping into a lofted hallway where I could see light from below and listen for sounds of the television. Unfortunately, making sure it was safe to sleep meant staying awake, lying on the carpet, re-reading books on the floor. That’s little kid logic for you. To complicate things further, my parent was a keeper of late hours. I was an exhausted little kid.
Many years later, I’ve carried ideas about who I am in relation to sleep and to dark hours informed by the habits I developed early. Believing myself to be just a “night owl” and then, naturally, “not a morning person.” I’ve thought of my sleep and its shape as insomnia, in other words, a problem. Making sleep a personal failure left me dreading nighttime for a new reason. Reading at night has never been something that helped my sleep either. I’ve read till sunrise too many times to count, and slapped my own wrist over what I saw as a bad habit.
Lately though, I’ve been feeling differently. To start, I realized that I actually am a morning person. I love the morning! It’s a mindful, welcoming, creative part of the day. I’m also a routine person… something else my young self would be shocked to learn.
When my mornings are in place, my evenings are softer. Sleep is still complicated in terms of quantity, but my relationship to it is becoming less combative. I’m learning that I also love nighttime. I still need the quiet of a house fully asleep before I can drift off. But I treasure the approach to sleep now, firmly based in routine, still chock full of books, but also relaxation.
Despite the quotes above, I’m not actually a believer in a religious Heaven. I am supposed to be. Was raised in the unquestioning certainty of all the zeal that the 90s protestant church becoming a mega church could muster. Heaven was as real as air in my community and my family. Quite uncomfortable for a kid who couldn’t quite get there in terms of believing in it, but very much believed that she was meant to and “what is wrong with me?” etc.
I do believe in heaven as a paradise though. I think it’s mostly a state of being – appreciativeness – that is not exclusive of this state of being. These thoughts, put into words by different writers, sort of came together lately for me – put my own nighttime in my mind, and linked it with the concept of heaven. Instead of thinking of night as a fearful, watchful time or as a time to fix something I’m doing wrong , I’m leaning into a softer, more level approach to both actual night and my thinking about it.
“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”
Reimagining night as a paradise – just like I can reimagine that bright, daytime “Christian Heaven” as a nighttime one – is revelatory to me. It means approaching what has only ever been scary, or drudgery, or failure as a reprieve. A welcome adventure through books, ideas, and the self… this is a very new practice for me and a kinder way to think of night and sleep.
Seems most things come back to that. Softness. What is night if not softness? Strong sunlight gives way to the luminescence of moon and stars. What is wind by day lays itself down into a breeze at night. Purring at your skin rather than pushing you through activity… Looking at night with love and softness makes something wholly different out of what was already there. As it does with most anything to which we apply the practice.
“I know most people try hard
to do good and find out too late
they should have tried softer.
I’ve never in my whole life
been levelheaded, but the older I get,
I’m more level-hearted—
and I think we make gods
who look like us for a reason.
I think, in spite of it all, we trust
we can be believed in.”
Thank you for reading. Wherever and whenever your heavens reside, I hope your next night is a good night.
-HR
Works referenced above:
The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer – https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-half-known-life-in-search-of-paradise_pico-iyer/36865042/#isbn=059342025X
Rememberings by Sinéad O’Connor – I really recommend listening to this as an audiobook and through your library. However, I have included the Spotify link below for reference.
Paperback https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/rememberings_sinead-oconnor/30687037/#isbn=0358695260
Audiobook https://open.spotify.com/show/0Go5da5z4MMZzKut1HROaN?si=2611e71bb7124ea8
Eva Luna by Isabel Allende https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/eva-luna-by-isabel-allende/266548/#isbn=1501117084
Letters of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson : Letter To Elizabeth Holland (20 January 1856)
You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson You Better Be Lightning – Button Poetry
Hard Return 