There is an enchanting stillness in the eve's twilight and subsequent dreamy darkness. We tidy up the day's achievements and slip underneath our hopes for tomorrow.

Or so we wish. But really, stepping into sleep is tense, impetuous, or simply pushed aside. We need a tonic for this space, a warm, milky drink for the soul. Jackie Morris (born in 1961), an artist of fleetfooted and level-headed pace,   I don't know entirely what I mean by that and I certainly don't claim its veracity, but its in her watercolor of things, the brushstrokes, her love of dogs and unravelling stories in everyday scenes. She seems to stride a gentle pace, a wavelength on which the hidden emerges. and uncanny reflection offers The Unwinding: and Other Dreamings.

This book is not meant to be read from cover to cover. It is a book for dreamers. Slight of word, rich of image, its purpose is to ease the soul.

[...]

The Unwinding is an invitation to shape-sift. It leaves space for the reader's imagination. The images and words are catalysts for the minds of dreams are not prescriptive. And yet were the book to be prescribed as a medicine, the prescription would read:

DIRECTIONS: Take one story last thing at night before bed, then tuck the book beneath your pillow.

This book inhabits a space we seek. Our instant like of anything 'cozy.' is the part of us that longs to be held by warm water, by arms, by the folds of wooly blankets and plumped cushions.

In all his complexity, Rimbaud once complained that winter was the season of comfort (and thus, by the poet, dreaded.)   The more I've read of Rimbaud and his champions, the richer this quote becomes. I turn to Erich Fromm's To Have or to Be which divides two human states, one of having (possessions but also characteristics) and the other of being, best defined by Walt Whitman's emphatic: "I exist as I am, that is enough, if no other in the world be aware I sit content." Perhaps Rimbaud connected winter to a state of having since wrapping up, warming up etc. is all we can do. And what we lose by it is any energy to simply be. How prophetic he was.

"Two days short of the winter solstice, the turn of the year's tide. All that cold day, the city and the countryside felt halted, paused." The calm, bright, wintery launch of Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways. Illustration by Jackie Morris.

Wild dreaming is
what they desire most.
Dreams that hold the scent
of deep green moss, lichen,
the place where the roots of
a tree entering the earth, old stone,
the dust of a moth's wings.

It is unwarranted, our current disrespect for sleep. We upvote cozy beds and nooks on social media, but how many of us slip into one? Does the artist herself?

Ursula Le Guin captures the power of this expanding time in her sensitive thoughtfulness of language and space:

I wish we had more respect for the great gift we are given, the silent hours, the interval of unknowing. Every night offers us a deep draft of the water of forgetfulness, the river Lethe, which we drink in remembrance of where we came from and in practice for our return. From it we rise renewed. Sleep is the strangest of initiations, the kindest of mysteries, a ceremony where observance is blessing. I wish we held it in the honor and gratitude it deserves.   I've explored the absence of this special time in Nighttime Activities Done in Solitude, a collection of things we get up to when we are abandoned by sleep but not by dreams or that dreamy state.
From Ursula K. Le Guin's "Great Nature's Second Course"

"And so it seemed to her that he had always been a part of the landscape of her life, this great white bear." Illustration by Jackie Morris.

Head in hands,
head on paw,
each rests in silent
trust of other,
while daylight moths
whisper night songs
and nightingale,
the bird of summer
threads his song of love
through the winter's dark.

To be held thus. To be safely thus. To be loved thus.

Did she know, this woman who found rest in the peace of wild things, how the swan, who offered her body as soft pillow, had once been a maiden, caught in a rainstorm, crouched by the water in shelter of bushes, mistaken by her lover out hunting in twilight, who, seeing her only white petticoat thought her a swan and shot? Did she understand how, rather than falling, her wild soul had risen into evening light and flight in the form of wild swan?

Hands-on fur and head in feathers, tails curled and pulsed the same. Peach moons and soft snow, Morris slips us deeply into a pre-time language we forgot and forsook.

Despite the geologists' knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps -
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.
From Wislawa Szymborska's "Dreams" published in Here.

Illustration by Jackie Morris.

She asked him, What
is the scent of snow?
He replied.
Soft, cold, blue.
And she asked if blue
could be a scent.
He answered,
Moss, tundra,
clean earth and lichen.
The scent of snow is calm,
An absence of scent that
illuminates, so that any
warm life smells so rich.

My mom sends me photos of snow back home, and I swear, I SWEAR; I can smell it. It is so fresh, so new. Held in unrepeating fractals, turning slightly sour when mixed with human scent. The smell of snow breaking down in the heat of living things.

Illustration by Jackie Morris.

I am lucky. My mind is visual in memory, personality, and pursuit. If my hands had eyes, I would be an artist, indeed. But alas. Writing is how my mind makes art.

Anyway, night after night, I slip into sleep, watching the movie of my life,   Roger Ebert once said he was "born in the movie of his life" and I agree wholeheartedly. I watch myself, sometimes watching myself watching myself. memories of my grandparent's farm, my childhood pets, and my daughters.

Illustration by Jackie Morris.

The last images to arrive, the deepest sanctuary of the mind, are those of me hiking across America alone, a trip years ago. The harmony of body and nature. Each root, step, rock for rest, and curious bird remembered. Each paw's weight is on the earth at night. It was the most formidable doing of my life, and I find refuge in the me who did it.

Curled close in the curves of creatures,
she rests now. Warm.
Safe.

Unwinding is a book for our exhausted, overwhelmed consciousness. We are just so awake. I mean that in a non-political sense. We long to be safe, secure, control of our lives, and we are not. We are so fearful and angry (the words are not enough).

Let this book give you the refuge of your most loved self.

 Illustration by Jackie Morris, courtesy of The Lost Words.

Other stories to drink before bed: Mary Oliver's melodies to the loves of her life, and the extant body of work that is Wendell Berry's poetry, Robert Macfarlane's search for wild places of the heart, Emma Mitchell's sojourn into nature and out of depression, a trip taken daily or Rachel Carson's generous observation of the natural world and all its splendor.

"Inside the forest was safe, was home. At the Edge and Beyond, all was wild, and who knew what manner of monsters lived there?" Illustration by Jackie Morris.

Unwind yourself into this book, and it will hold you fast. Firm. Safe. Into and beyond the dreamy, wild twilight.