Two married women met at a dinner party in 1922 and wrote to each other for the rest of one of their lives.

Drift off to sleep with the story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. They met on 14 December 1922 at Clive Bell's house in Bloomsbury, where Virginia was unimpressed and Vita was not. Three years later Virginia spent three December nights at Long Barn in Kent, and Vita's diary recorded only that it was a peaceful evening. In January 1926, unable to sleep in Milan on her way to Persia, Vita wrote the plainest sentence she ever wrote: "I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia."

Out of it came Orlando, begun in October 1927 and published by the Woolfs' own Hogarth Press on 11 October 1928, dedicated to Vita and illustrated with photographs of her costumed as its hero, who lives three hundred years and changes sex along the way. Vita's son later called it the longest and most charming love letter in literature. That same year Vita lost Knole, the house she was born in, because she was a daughter and the estate followed the male line. In 1930 she bought a ruin called Sissinghurst and spent the rest of her life building a garden there, including a white garden that still glows after sunset.

Woolf's last letter to Vita, six days before her death in March 1941, ends not in longing but in thanks.

Told twice, as always: once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses. Winter lamplight in Kent, hand-set type in a basement, deer under old trees, pale roses at dusk.

Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support and if not, no need at all, sleep well either way.

Drift off to sleep learning how the rainbow flag was made: in an attic, in trash cans, by thirty people with dye on their hands.

In June 1978, Gilbert Baker and around thirty volunteers hand-dyed a thousand yards of muslin on the top floor of a San Francisco community center and stitched two flags, each thirty feet by sixty. The eight stripes carried meanings, hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic and art, indigo for serenity, violet for spirit. On June 25 they rose at United Nations Plaza, and Baker said the crowd understood in an instant, that it belonged to all of us. Tonight's story follows him from a Kansas railroad town through the Army, through Harvey Milk's election and his assassination, through the practical accidents that turned eight stripes into six, through a mile-long flag carried by ten thousand people in 1994 and a flag laid from one ocean to the other in 2003, to his death in 2017 and the rediscovered fragment of an original flag that came home to San Francisco with its colors still bright.

Told twice, once at a natural pace and once more slowly with longer pauses to carry you into sleep. Expect hot dye stirred with broom handles, stained knuckles, wet cotton, and color drying on lines in the last of the afternoon light.

💛 Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support and if not, no need at all, sleep well either way.

Drift off to sleep learning about the Healer Stones of Kapaemahu, four boulders on Waikīkī Beach that have held a suppressed truth for five centuries.

Long before the reign of chief Kakuhihewa in the 1500s, four healers sailed from Tahiti to Oʻahu: Kapaemahu, Kahaloa, Kapuni, and Kinohi. They were māhū, people of dual male and female spirit, and in Hawaiian understanding, that duality was the source of their healing power. Beloved for their gentle ways and miraculous cures, they were honored at their departure with four great stones moved by thousands of people on the sacred night of Kāne, imbued with the healers' names and mana after a month of ceremony. Princess Kaʻiulani laid seaweed lei on the stones before her morning swims. Then missionaries arrived, the word māhū fell into forced silence, and in 1941 the stones were buried under a bowling alley. Unearthed in 1963 and restored in 1997, the monument's signage still erased the healers' identity, until Kumu Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu and filmmakers Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson brought the story back with the Oscar-shortlisted animated film "Kapaemahu" (2020), narrated in ʻŌlelo Niʻihau, a Bishop Museum exhibition, and a new bronze plaque dedicated October 24, 2023, the first signage ever to name the healers' dual male and female spirit.

Tonight's story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly, with longer pauses, to guide you gently into sleep.

Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support and if not, no need at all, sleep well either way.