The story of Grove to Sleep
Grove to Sleep is a mangrove, and a mangrove is brackish — it grows exactly where fresh water meets salt. That is why it is here and nowhere else: between the laguna and the shore, on the hinge, where the water finally stops being river water. Beside a waterfall it would have been impossible. Here it is simply true. Dan named it, and the name is doing something underneath. Said aloud, Grove to Sleep is go to sleep — so the instruction gets given without anybody having to give it. Better still, it is already ours: go to sleep now is rung five of the Sleep Ladder, so the place and the rung say the same thing, and a child hears it twice without being told once. It is a threshold rather than a stop. A mangrove is tangled and dark and busy, and the eye has to work at it, and work is the one thing a lullaby cannot ask for. So it is the last fifteen seconds of the laguna and the first fifteen of the shore, and it passes. The rule that keeps it kind is short. Nothing is ever hidden here. The arching stilt roots are architecture, not a thicket; the water between them is still and dark and mirror-flat and there is nothing in it; a few pale shafts come down through the canopy and are the one bright thing. If a picture of this place ever makes anybody wonder what is in there, it is the wrong picture and it is taken again.
Stories from Grove to Sleep
Nothing from here has been published yet. Grove to Sleep is still being filmed — the honest kind of gap, like the route’s “resident owed”.
In the archive
2 pieces of Grove to Sleep exist in the archive — 2 locations. They arrive here as they are approved and published.