Further Reading: Finding Rest

On embracing fallow seasons, here and around the Web.

A quiet Sunday morning in Brooklyn last weekend

This week, we’re recovering from the latest in an endless parade of low-grade winter colds. We took last weekend to come up for air and to visit our friends in Brooklyn on a sleepy Sunday morning, and we are looking forward to traveling to warmer climes over Winter Break. I have heard from many folks in this budding community that they, too, are combating more sickness this year than ever before, and just need a minute.

You are tired, and I am tired. I set a goal for myself to publish this writing on a regular schedule, and it is important to me to keep my writing promises to myself this year. (My fellow writers know the pain that comes from breaking these promises to oneself.) At the same time, this year has taught me nothing if not about the importance of respecting my own life/death/rebirth cycles. 

As creators and caregivers, we can gin up so much enthusiasm for the tasks of planting the seeds, watching something grow up and leaf out, and witnessing it coming into full bloom. Too often, though, we forget the part of the growth cycle where we have to simply step back, let the seeds blow in the wind where they may, and allow our roots to absorb fully the gathered sweetness of the season. To rest.

When we forget this, we take a process meant to sustain us and our loved ones, and we make it unsustainable. Our bodies and garden beds burn out. The only way to resolve this issue, I’ve found, is to then let our creative fields lie fallow for a longer period of time. 

I am coming out of one such fallow time, and so I want be especially careful with myself and with you. I want this project to feel sustainable to write, and sustainable to read. 

So, this week, instead of a new post, I am including a roundup of the posts so far – a bouquet of what I’ve grown, for you and anyone else who may be interested in this growing collection of essays on grief, science, storytelling and spirituality.

A bouquet of snowdrops, emerging from the rested winter ground

WRITINGS ON REST

#1: Started again, imperfectly

In this post, I introduced this humble project, and talked a bit about how my life and writing have changed since my latest initiation. 

#2: Learned to grieve from trees

In this post, I talked about the larger ideas I’ve been exploring about grief – about how trees can recover from trauma if they have support from their communities. Spending time among them in this fallow season has taught me much about how to heal. 

#3: Mourning and re-making the village

Here, I wrote about the state of that community support in 2023 – what we long for, what’s missing, and how to rebuild the village, as so many of us are hungering to do. Acknowledging what’s gone and endeavoring to be part of the rebuilding has been a recent initiation for me. 

#4: Telling my son stories in order to live

In this post, I found myself connecting a story I’ve been telling my son about the history of the Earth with my own history, and that of my ancestors. Because we need stories from the past, as well as community in the present, to heal from what hurts. 

#5: Fed by my Mother Trees

Our culture hasn’t always been great about caring for those in grief. But in this post, I talk about ways in which this might be changing for our generation – as digital connections begin to mirror and to extend the analog root systems that sustained our ancestors. 

(Ed: @the.feelings.teacher has since made an amazing reel on this, featuring Ace of Base, that all Millennials should go watch right now.)

Bellying up to the kombucha bar at Anima Mundi in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

RESOURCES FROM AROUND THE INTERNET:

• Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry is doing powerful work at the intersection of rest and social justice. Her interview on We Can Do Hard Things will inspire you to stand up for your right to lay down. 

• Rest advocate Octavia Raheem models running a successful business as a Black woman in a balanced way. Her newsletter provides well-written, regular reminders to rethink the messages we’ve received about rest, within an intersectional framework similar to Hersey’s. Highly recommend. 

• Nicola Jane Hobbs (@nicolajanehobbs) has great workshops and social media content that aim to help high-achievers with anxiety to identify goals for rest. She also offers scripts for helpful self-talk, for those moments when we’re not feeling worthy of it. 

• “Put your own oxygen mask on first” ranks right up there with “sleep when the baby sleeps” for me in terms of advice that seems sound but is maddeningly hard to put into practice. This episode of 10% Happier, featuring both a polyvagal theory expert and a Buddhist teacher in conversation (swoon), offers proof that best gift you can give others really is your own regulated nervous system. Because just like pink eye in seemingly every daycare this season, your sense of calm can be highly contagious.

• The Chamber of Mothers, a new policy advocacy group for parents, is beginning to gather steam. They advocate for paid leave and affordable child care, among other things, because our national rest deficit is a systemic issue, not just one for individual people to solve with #selfcare. They’re putting an initial series of local chapter meetings on the schedule for cities across the U.S. Check them out here.