In a recent blog, the wonderful and irrepressible Maeve, a character “created” by the novelist Elizabeth Cunningham, is talking about her author. “Who do you think she talks to when she wakes up in the middle of the night?” she asks. “Who do you talk to?”
This made me pause and ask myself that same question. I didn’t have a ready answer. Not that I don’t talk to someone when I wake up in the middle of the night, but it’s not someone I can readily name. That Someone has been there listening for a good long time—maybe most of my life—but it’s not one of my characters, and I don’t think I’ve ever assigned the Listener a name. Or even a sex.
Originally, I was going to call that someone the Silent Listener, but that’s not strictly true. Sometimes that still, deep place answers back. No, I don’t mean I hear voices in the room. I mean that there are times when something bubbles up from the deep well of the Soul Place, a communication from…Well, yes, that’s the question. From the Beyond or from the Deep Within, hard to say which. Maybe both, maybe neither.
All I do know is that I can chat away about anything with the Listener. I can figure things out in our mostly one-way dialogue. When I’m really talking to the Listener, and not some hollow echo of my own reactive mind, there’s no judgment. In fact, there is often the subtle pulse of reminder that what I’m thinking or feeling isn’t so peculiar, that many people have felt or thought that way in the past, that I’m all right, doing the best I can.
Whoever is on the other end of the line, it’s a blessed communication.
Who do you talk to in the middle of the night?
