Wresting Rest...
...from the clutches of modern life...
You do not have to earn rest.
Lately, I’ve been sitting with this idea of needing to wrest rest from the grasp of modernity. The current paradigm wants us to believe that rest must be earned and therefore can only be fully experienced by those who are privileged - who have enough, hustled enough, made enough, worked enough – and have “earned” the ability / space / time to rest.
Rest is a foundational part of living and is integral for our survival.
When humanity chose to distance ourselves from the entangled web of the world and became convinced that we are somehow “above”, “better” or “more” than Nature, we pushed aside our bodies’ inborn animal senses, desires, and wisdom. We have forgotten not only how to rest, but how important it is.
We have spent so much time devaluing these aspects of our beings, that the signals our animal bodies send us are no longer understood. Our animal instincts and intuition were discarded in favour of what we can point to and prove and define. We have retreated into the bony cave of our skulls, disallowing all other forms of Knowledge and Wisdom, save what we call logical thought.
Rest does not require anything of you other than being present to what is.
What might we find if we were to venture out of the cage of our thinking minds and journey down the bony ladder of our spines? What might we learn if we were to spend some quality time in our animal bodies? What would happen if we explored the valley of our ribs, the caverns of our lungs, the strength and softness of our hearts? What would it mean to rebelliously live in a sensual awareness of our entire beings, honouring whatever was present, including the need to rest?
If we travel deep enough, carrying the intention to truly listen to (and trust in) what our body has to tell us, it's possible we could receive nothing less than the secrets of the Universe.
We owe it to ourselves to wrest this kind of rest from the grips of modern life. Let us reclaim rest as a form of luxury, not in the modern material sense, but as a form of rebellious living and celebrating the sensual.
Nature understands that there is a time for being external – for light, growth, and expansion - and for being internal – for reflection, introspection, depth, and rest. True Rest is integral to balancing the active, bright, external aspects of our daily lives. Remembering that we cannot force Spring to arrive before her time is integral to healing our relationship with the animate Earth.
What would happen if we honoured our own animal bodies’ need to rest; if we embraced the quiet stillness and welcomed Rest as a friend?
Imagine the stories that would be shared, the memories and the inspiration that might be sparked, the ideas that could turn into seeds that would be planted in the dark. Having welcomed Rest as a friend, would we then have the patience to wait for those seeds growth to unfurl in their own time?
I wonder...