Rest
I confess I do not like this season when all of nature, wrapped in blankets of snow, seems to sleep or at least conserve energy. Socialized to value productivity over rest, wintertime always feels painfully foreign to me, like wasted time. Yet, lately, reading the book, Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey, I have been challenged to rethink my values around the concept of rest.
Hersey asserts that the mindset of treating human beings like machines, valued only for what they can produce, and immediately discarded or at least devalued when they do not produce, is rooted in capitalism and white supremacy, created on the plantations through acts of violence and theft. Our current grind culture, with its idolization of productivity, reinforces these evils and keeps us in a perpetually exhausted state, unable to muster the energy we need to disrupt and heal systems of oppression.
So, to push back, Hersey created “The Nap Ministry” which has four tenets:
Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy.
Our bodies are sites of liberation.
Naps provide a portal to imagine, invent, and heal.
Our DreamSpace has been stolen, and we want it back. We will reclaim it via rest.
If you, like me, have been ambivalent in relation to rest, I invite you to begin to consider rest as a form of activism. We are not only valuable when we are producing. We are divinely-created human beings, worthy of time to rest, play, dream, and heal. When we rest, we can imagine new solutions to our problems, unleash our innate creativity, and deeply renew ourselves. Wintertime is when nature regularly models for us the beauty and importance of rest. Let us join in.
God of all seasons, thank you for this season and the gift of rest. As we rest, may we regularly meet you in the DreamSpace and be restored and renewed. Amen.
Roxanne is a member of Peace Church who is in recovery from over-functioning. Her cats often remind her to slow down, stretch, and take a nice, long nap.