Sleeeeeeeeeep…
One of the things that people who have come to visit me in my home here have in common is that the first night here, especially if they are city people, they sleep for a very long time. Like twelve hours long. It happened to me too when I first moved here. The funny thing about sleep is that one night of it, is just enough to make you feel like you’re exhausted. It seems as though once your body gets to relax enough for a night to ereally sleep, you feel how little sleep you’ve beenb getting for a long long time. Maybe that’s why there’s a rise in “Sleep Tourism” at the moment? I mean, one CNN article doesn’t make it true, but it’s a really great thing to focus of when your business is essentially a bed under a canopy in the woods, I suppose. It would seem, as well, that although there is a new spate of articles coming out right now (like, this week) which all seem to be variations on a listicle, there’s been talk of the idea of sleep tourism for a while.
Something I struggle with, that i can only assume is a shared experience of sorts, is giving myself permission to sleep. The idea that we must be making the most of every moment and that making the most means neglecting the needs of the body, and consequentially the mind as well, is something I have to really focus on doing for myself. Thinking of focusing on self care, even if that involves sleeping a bunch is at odds with the kind of experience everything DO! DO! DO! ethinc that seems to be part of the zeitgeist right now. During the middle of the pandemic we learned about how much slowing down was not only good for us, but for the planet. only to come out the other side of the worst of it itching to go go go again. Now here we are, making up for lost time and looking back on the dreamy memories of slowness and lessened consumption as they fade into mist.
WELP, I say Fuck That! Let’s sleep on vacation. Let’s let the smells of the woods and the sounds of the wind and the water lapping at the shore take us to internal places where stupid buzzwords(buzzanagrams? Not anagrams, I forget what you call those. Buzzacrostics? Nope, that’s not it either.) like FOMO and YOLO don’t exist, or at least have no power. Let’s spend the day at the beach, jumping into waves cause we want to, then sitting on the sand, not worried that we’ll miss the best wave of the day. They’re waves, they’ll be there. I think to do that for my guests I want to make things available that will really drive home sleep and the importance of rest. I always wanted to have a Faraday bag at the door of each tent to drop your phone into, as the woods seems like a good place to unplug, but as well as that, things like those awful weighted blankets that people seem to love. They make me feel like I’m dying, but I digress… I’m going to look more into a sleep program for guests, optional, of course. If you want to juice every bit of experience you can get out of your time off, I get that too. I go camping to get away from those stresses and I feel like going camping with a queen sized bed, and breakfast brought to your doorstep should lean into that even more. I’m not sure what a sleep program looks like, but I will find out, and then you will too, and when we finally get to sleep it’ll be deep and relaxing and restorative.
Best Kept Seacret, maybe it was all just a dream…
