sleeping like Endymion

Endymion was a young shepherd of surpassing beauty, and the tales of him are old and tangled, told a little differently in every telling. But they agree on the heart of it: that Selene, the goddess of the moon, looked down from her silver course one night, saw him sleeping on a hillside, and fell hopelessly in love.

Night after night, so the story goes, the moon-goddess came down to gaze on the sleeping youth, unwilling to let his beauty fade or his life end as mortal lives do. And so a wish was made — by Selene, some say, or by Endymion himself when a god offered him any gift he chose — that he might sleep forever, untouched by age or death.

The wish was granted. Endymion was laid in a cave on Mount Latmus and sank into an eternal, dreamless sleep, ageless and serene, his beauty fixed as it had been on that first night. And there he slept on, year after year, century after century, while the moon crossed the sky above him and came down, faithful, to watch over his rest.

It is a soft and dreaming sort of myth, folk-told and half-remembered, less a story of great deeds than a single unfading image: a young man asleep in the moonlight, at perfect peace, beyond the reach of the cares that trouble waking life.

So sleeping like Endymion is to sleep just so — deeply, peacefully, and untroubled, wrapped in a rest so sound and so serene that the world and its worries cannot reach you.