Soul Rest
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to go on my very first hermitage at Pacem in Terris in Isanti, MN. The hermitage cabins are spread throughout acres of quiet woods with a meandering gravel road and small walking trails connecting them. There is no electricity. There is no indoor plumbing. There is a basket of fruit and bread waiting for you, a bed and a rocking chair, snow covered trees, squirrels, owls, deer, and blessed, blessed quietness.
I sat in the rocking chair. I looked out the window and felt burdens melting off my body and mind. A revolutionary thought occurred to me: I deserve this rest. And then I walked over to the bed and fell asleep for 16 hours.
View from inside Margaret Mary Hermitage
I’ve been thinking about how we do deeply believe rest is something we have to earn or can’t have unless we deserve it, when rest is so richly interwoven in the very cycles of our bodies and the earth. Our bodies need sleep, every single 24 hour period. Infants teach us this so well, falling asleep constantly and anywhere, keeping their eyes open for such few hours, demanding rest with their wails. And we know to protect the preciousness of this rest, to hold it gently in our arms, to not need their dear, little bodies to produce anything, that growing, eating, sleeping, existing in our love is enough.
And culturally, we continue to maintain that some bodies are allowed rest while others aren’t. I recently stumbled upon a 100 year old National Geographic Magazine. It’s a fascinating deep dive into how little some of our racist and sexist assumptions have changed. While they may not be as overt and openly shared as they were in 1924, they exist. In this issue, reporters go to 4 different countries and describe the way people live. It will not shock you to hear that lighter skinned groups are described as “industrious” and darker skinned groups are described as wasteful and non-productive for things like striking up conversations, pausing to pray multiple times a day, and not working when the sun is high. Our culture has so deeply embedded the ideas of “a moving body”=good and “a still body”=bad AND then transferred this good/bad dichotomy in racist ways onto entire groups of people—these biases haunt us in profound ways today.
Image from The Nap Ministry
This idea of rest is beyond individual choices for “well-being” and extends to systemic and cultural assumptions that need to shift. We need a society that actively supports and protects rest. But, as we work for those messages to be normalized and for structures to change, we can, as individuals protect our own right to rest. This strikes me as an act of beautiful protest against the capitalistic forces demanding our productivity. You do not need to justify your rest. You do not need to earn your rest. You do not need to have a harder life than another person to rest. Your rest is very good, and you can begin to value it today.
For inspiration, check out The Nap Ministry (rest as resistance!), a Mother’s Rest and I know I have mentioned him before, but the writing of Ross Gay (who has an essay about the complexity of napping in public) is a constant reminder of how to rest in joy, to really experience it, within the bittersweet and the grief and the grind—if you need to rest in something right now, read this little essay about Ross Gay kissing his dog 8000 times.
“A synonym for loitering, Gay points out, it “taking one’s time.” Not only does this connote a pleasurable slowing down, but a claiming of one’s time as one’s own, a radical stance in our productiveness-driven society, particularly for people of color. ”
Because our world is so fast-paced and full of constant demands, there is a certain discipline required for rest—a spiritual discipline held within a deep compassion and flexibility. I think there are ways we can start right now to rest from expectations about success, from mental messages and scripts that tell us we are worthless if we are still, and from the desperation to prove something about ourselves to someone by going, going, going. We can capture this messaging, and we can expose it for the lie it is.
We can also make ourselves rest. And this one is harder. The rest we need in our current world does not happen accidentally or automatically. It means actually going to sleep when I have time to sleep. It means actually sitting and doing nothing, even though scrolling through an endless feed might seem like it also counts as “relaxing.” It means teaching my physical body that it does not need to be doing anything or thinking anything, something that spiritual practices like prayer, meditation, or sabbath can give us.
AND it take a village willing to invest money—it means employers giving employees paid time off, people receiving living wages at all jobs, enough caregivers so that caregivers can have respite, making the process of receiving disability benefits less prohibitive, providing grants and funding for people to create. It means normalizing ALL BODIES doing nothing.
How do we, as a society, create ways for everyone to have this necessary rest and safety, the quiet space from which art and love are born? I deserve rest. You deserve rest. May it be so. Amen.
