[quotes] Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto - Tricia Hersey 2022

 

"This book is a testimony and testament of my refusal to donate my body to a system that still owes a debt to my Ancestors for the theft of their labor and DreamSpace. I refuse to push my body to the brink of exhaustion and destruction. Let the chips fall where they may. I trust myself more than capitalism."

"May the ground underneath hold us, and if we must collapse, may a soft pillow be there."

"I am in awe of what our bodies can hold. We must lighten our loads. Survival is not the end goal for liberation. We must thrive. We must rest."

"Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. Both these toxic systems refuse to see the inherent divinity in human beings and have used bodies as a tool for production, evil, and destruction for centuries."

"Grind culture is a collaboration between white supremacy and capitalism. It views our divine bodies as machines."

"TENETS OF THE NAP MINISTRY: 1. Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. 2. Our bodies are a site of liberation. 3. Naps provide a portal to imagine, invent, and heal. 4. Our DreamSpace has been stolen and we want it back. We will reclaim it via rest."

"Rest supports our grieving by allowing space, and with space we can begin healing from the trauma of grind culture. Grieving is a sacred act and one of the ways we can begin to reconnect with our bodies, as we craft a rest practice."

"To be colonized is to accept and buy into the lie of our worth being connected to how much we get done. Keep repeating to yourself: I am enough now. There is no way around this."

"Resting our bodies and minds is a form of reverence. When we honor our bodies via rest, we are connecting to the deepest parts of ourselves."

"I don't belong to the systems. They cannot have me. I will never donate my body to a system that views it as only a tool for its production."

"You are the expert of your own body. Your body is yours and knows the way."

"Your mind needs space for silence. Space to process what it is feeling without the participation of others. Your brain needs deep, consistent sleep, rest, and silence to make new connections, for memory retention, and to download."

"Rest is anything that allows you to slow down enough to allow your body and mind to connect in the deepest way. We must be focused on knowing that our bodies and our worth are not connected to how many things we can check off."

"Rest must be practiced daily until it becomes our foundation."

"We speak so highly of the material and nonmaterial things we desire to feel whole and expansive without addressing the sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and disconnection we suffer from."

"Liberation is a process. Freedom is a temporary state of being. Liberation is dynamic. It never ends."

"Like Audre Lorde, I am totally enamored and lay my body on the altar of poetry. I am a dreamer because I am a poet."

"Techniques to create space to dream: Cultivate deep community that is now allowed to post online."

"Rest is somatic work - connecting your body and mind. Rest is anything that slows you down enough to connect with your body and mind. It is an ethos that holds firm to the body as a site of liberation."

"There is room to rest in the freedom of managing your own deprogramming journey. IT is never either/or and always both/and. You don't have to grind, hustle, accept burnout as normal, and be in constant state of exhaustion and sleep deprivation. You don't have to kill yourself spiritually or physically to live a fruitful life."

"Softness is available to us. Care is available to us. Rest is available to us. Intimacy is available to us. Community is available to us. Sleep is available to us. Justice is available to us. Pleasure is available to us."

"Any system that degrades and ignores our divine right to have care, rest, leisure, and space must be examined and illuminated. The time is up for any shallow wellness work that doesn't speak about dismantling the systems that are making us unwell."

"Do not let your lack of money and possessions make you feel negative about your worth as a human being. Do not let your credit score, man-made poverty, and/or racism define your extreme power. Your body is a site of liberation. Rest is your true power. Your birth was not a coincidence. Your coming to Earth is a divine occurrence."

"We are moving in and out of worlds all the time so give beautiful grace to yourself. Start again on rest. Keep going back to rest. Stay in the DreamSpace."

"Octavia Butler shares a powerful truth related to imagination: 'The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities is an act of hope.'"

[quotes] To Shake the Sleeping Self - Jeddediah Jenkins

 

"I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine."

"But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what's next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand."

"But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When I'm in a new place, I don't know what's next, even if I've read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends."

"I'd done everything right. I'd spent my twenties going to college and law school and getting a job and being a good boy. But when I turned thirty, I quit my job and spent a year and a half bicycling from Oregon to Patagonia. It wasn't the job that chased me away, it was mortality."

"I would be stripped of what me feel safe to make room for something else."

"Let whatever money I have flow through me."

"For me, thoughts and emotions stay cloudy until I put them into words, give them bodies to walk around in and be their own thing. That's when they become knowable."

"A dream is the myriad ways we could be fulfilled in life using our talents to make beautiful things. But then there are goals. Goals are specific guesses at what we could do or become to fulfill our dream. Dreams are like a compass that points in a general direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way. Goals are just guesses at where to make a home, and when they aren't right, we try another."

"I've read that the San Diego-Tijuana border runs down the middle of the largest wealth gap in the world."

"Either way, my culture is the most dominant on the planet, and I benefit from that. Sitting there watching Alejandro studying my markup like it was holy scripture made me wonder, what moral weight does being the beneficiary of my dominant culture place on my shoulders?"

"This, in my opinion, is why so many gay people turn to art, music, fashion, or comedy. As the world around them grows hostile, their spirit becomes obsessed with the meaning of it all."

"I was homesick, but also leaning into the lessons I knew I wanted from this bicycle. I was unpacking the bags of my life, spreading the contents on the floor to have a look."

"As he talked, I would drift between good cheer and observation. This often happens to me when I'm listening to someone tell a story they've rehearsed a hundred times with a hundred different visitors. Their face is not astonished by their own words; they're not reading your face as they go, to tell if their sentences are landing. They're bored at the injustice of having to make their case again and again to a deaf universe."

"It's remarkable how normal moments live on in the middle of chaos and tragedy. People still play chess and drink tea in the middle of war. New inside jokes are born at funerals."

"Human brings have little capacity for sustained horror. I think our minds need to play to survive. Permanently serious people always look so tired, maybe because they are fighting an emotional battle that eats the body alive. To laugh and play while the bombs drop is one way to survive a war, even to win it."

"And it would be here when I got back. Perhaps tweaked and slightly changed, but not transformed. It would be the thing I stepped away from. It would be the routine I could return to."

"The humidity that enveloped us felt so thick that I thought I could bite the air."

"You don't want to spin through space without a tether."

"What better place to destroy God than surrounded by His best handiwork? Or what better place to replace the white man's God with the god of nature?"

"Jesus had kept me from kissing a boy for twenty-eight years. Jesus had kept me from myself. I had thrown myself upon Him so that He might fulfill me. If He unraveled before me, or worse, vanished, what would I make of my youth?"

"I am a Christian, but how many beliefs can I strip away before I am not anymore? Do I believe the world is six thousand years old? No. Do I believe the Bible is the infallible word of God? Hmm, I think it's inspired, but open to interpretation."

"Maybe that's what I was rejecting now. Certainty. But that's what faith is - believing without certainty."

"I wanted to understand who lives and who dies, but I didn't. I just believed that I would always be okay. It was unshakable. Maybe some people just have that. Harry Devert certainly did, and he died. But I did, too, and I was still here."

"If our shittiest actions can lead to beauty, what does it mean to do right and wrong? Is it about avoiding hurting others?"

"They keep Americans arguing over guns and black people so they won't look outside the country and see that the U.S. is an empire."

"I couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew that my deepest wounds were the place of my deepest meaning. And she was ground zero. My salvation was somewhere inside her."

"An awareness of my own hypocrisy stung me. I hadn't noticed this in myself. And from this thought, it spread in me an empathy for my mom, for the people in my church. If I, being in a category of oppression, could still mock another who is literally the same as me, then how common must that hypocrisy be?" 

"Exposure to human stories reminds us that we're all human. I mean real exposure. Listening, hearing. Not point from across the room. Engaging. And most of us are just trying to make it day by day without hurting anyone else."

"Everywhere, the wonders of Patagonia rose up around me, but by then, and with no one to exclaim to, I stopped exclaiming. I looked, and my eyes were happy. But I had no one to sing the praises of Creation to. Only the Creation itself."

"More than that, I needed it to reveal my questions to me, then answer them. What a burden to put on travel, which in itself is ignorant and indifferent. It becomes so hard to just enjoy the thing as it happens. We make the journey about arrival, not travel. We are so goal focused."

"I wanted to leave my office life in order to feel time passing in some more holy way, holding it in my fingers and studying each minute like a prayer bead."

"For the first time in my life, I felt that my only allegiance was to the truth. Not to tradition. Not to safety. Not to what I had been taught. But to whatever was true. And that made me feel strong."