Fall asleep with Henrik

Tonight I fall into the strange little trapdoor between Swedish and English, Sleepy, where one word is perfectly innocent on one side of the sea and slightly alarming on the other.

There will be Swedish words. Real ones. Suspicious ones. A few that sound rude but are mostly about road signs, ice cream, children, baths, herring, nurses, kindness and the grief of standing in a doorway. Somewhere in there we find lagom, fika, orka, jobbig, sjö, jo, and a made-up word that maybe should exist: threshold grief.

It’s an introspective and slightly linguistic journey to sleep, through language, memory, fatherhood, old places, Swedish fog, and Pippi Longstocking. You may learn something. You may learn absolutely nothing. Both outcomes are accepted here.

Sleep Tight!

More about Henrik, click here: https://linktr.ee/Henrikstahl
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi Sleepy. Tonight we wander into that strange little gap before a feeling has a name. A sound moves the air in your ear, a smell opens a basement door inside you, a birch tree in the wind becomes childhood, and suddenly the body has arrived long before the words come running after it, late and out of breath.

There are grannies, boomers, vowels and bowels, thunder at the kitchen table, a cemetery walk among birches, and one small blissling in a northern Swedish church that grows when it is gently noticed. This is an introspective and slightly ridiculous journey to sleep about feeling, memory, language, smell, the body, and all the things in us that never become sentences.

Drift off to sleep, Sleepy. It is what it is. What happens, happens. And right now, there is nothing we can do about it.

Sleep Tight!

More about Henrik, click here: https://linktr.ee/Henrikstahl
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tonight I circle around the small surrender of it is what it is, Sleepy. Weather, gravity, cold tea, ancient rocks, dogs, cats, seeds cracking open in the dark, and the strange comfort of being a tiny passenger on a planet that refuses to ask our permission.

This is a soft, wandering journey to sleep about the things we can’t control, the things growing quietly inside us, and the lighthouse keeper in all of us who can only keep the light going while the sea does what the sea does.

So drift off to sleep, or just lie there with me for a while. What happens, happens. And right now, there is nothing we can do about it.

Sleep Tight!

More about Henrik, click here: https://linktr.ee/Henrikstahl
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode I sit on a slightly uncomfortable bar stool in my Stockholm apartment and begin, somehow, with posture. Then we drift, Sleepy, into figure skating, old video cameras, a very expensive leather jacket, a glass of red wine at "The Prince", and the strange fear of being loved too directly.

There are teenage storage rooms, unfinished feelings, first relationships, cowardly letters, phone calls to fathers who don’t quite know how to answer, and a night walk through the Forest Cemetery with too much alcohol and too much heart.

It’s an episode about wanting love and wanting solitude, about the younger versions of ourselves who tried to understand what love was while already being afraid of it. Maybe it’s also about the fact that nothing is wasted. Not even the embarrassing parts. Especially not those.

Come drift off to sleep with me, Sleepy. We’ll let the old stories skate around for a while, and then maybe they’ll leave us alone.

Sleep Tight!

More about Henrik, click here: https://linktr.ee/Henrikstahl
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Sleepy, I speak from my apartment instead of my little studio in the backyard, surrounded by a portable recording booth, a stiff bar stool, and the faint sound of children in the yard outside.

From there, my mind wanders to kindergarten, clay birds with bright feathers, fur coats in a hallway, and the strange fact that some part of me may still be waiting to be picked up. Then I drift between city and countryside, sirens and roosters, foxes and streetlights, dark skies and apartment ceilings striped with other people’s headlights.

This is a soft introspective journey to sleep about where I come from, what I’ve gotten used to, what I miss, and whether loneliness is larger in a crowd or under indifferent stars.

It is what it is. What happens, happens. And right now, there’s nothing we can do about it.

Sleep Tight!

More about Henrik, click here: https://linktr.ee/Henrikstahl
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.