Rest as a Lifelong Practice

from leisurely naps to small windows of precious moments

BGCL explores what it means to rewild and to come back into connection with ourselves, our communities, and the living world around us. Read on for ideas and reflections to inspire new ways of being in a complex world. 💚

Dear friends,

Life feels like it is racing by right now. Things to do, places to be. This has been a full season of life and learning to do a graceful dance of work and rest has been a struggle. At one point this summer, a dear friend of my said: Hillarie, you are too outside. She was right.

I am proud that even in the busiest of times this year, I have made pockets of time for myself. For dipping into things I love, fill my soul, and bring me into the present. The things that rest my mind, body and spirit. Gardening, silly moments with my kids, reading books, tea with my morning breathwork, dreaming with my husband, sitting in the forest, walks with friends, and dancing amongst the trees.

But the rest I get now is not like the rest I got when we first moved to the country. That was a stillness that I don’t know if I will ever recapture. I recall the deep rest I was getting the months after I left Amazon. The universe commanded that rest. My body completely crashed and I had no idea what it would take to feel recovered. Your girl was resting in ways that I did not know possible.

That season of rest was a great privilege that I never expected to step into. Since high school I worked full time and gave all of my energy to my career. Working was my identity. I didn’t know who I was outside of producing things. I had embodied the competition, the critique, and the conquering of the corporate tech world.

The moment I unplugged, by body gave into the rest I withheld for years. My days were a compilation of communing with in my garden, sipping teas made of herbs I grew, and taking leisurely cat naps in sunny spaces in my home. I nourished my family with gorgeous farm fresh meals and spent days with farm friends dreaming of radical plans to feed our community.

That was a special and sacred season of my life, and I never expected the lessons that good rest would teach me. Lessons about rewilding that could only come sitting still for long periods of time. They cut me open, expanded my heart, and healed me through practices of presence. Rest held up a mirror and helped me to see myself more clearly. It seeded my wildest ideas and gave me the spaciousness to imagine a different, more loving world.

Rest also taught me that I have value beyond my labor. That being present with myself is an incredible gift. Rest showed me how to appreciate my eccentricities, neuroticism, perfectionism, and need to achieve. I learned that even through these traits make difficult companions, they aim to protect and teach me something in this lifetime.

I took long baths and took myself on coffee dates. I studied patterns in the earth and examined those patterns within me. I learned to speak kindly to myself and to hold myself to more humane standards. I learned to allow room for my mistakes and how to take greater accountability. I learned to show up for myself—to have my own back. I learned that I first needed to disable the hierarchy that exists within me before I can do that work out in the world.

That period of rest forever changed me. Two years ago, I wrote Our Sacred Right to Rest, and it remains one of my favorite posts. I wanted to share an updated version of that today as a reminder to me and us that we do not have to earn rest. Rest is our birthright and the space where we dream up new possibilities to a broken world. May we rest to bring us into greater harmony with ourselves, each other, and this earth.

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Our Sacred Right to Rest

“There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

We are some years out since our world was flipped upside down by the pandemic. As I look around at my family and friends in various states of new normal, I see one common thread: everyone is damn tired.

The fatigue runs deep in my bones too, and it has left me thinking of how little we value rest in our modern culture. I’ve become more aware of the ways in which our lives are consumed with activity, both essential and self-induced, from end-to-end.

Rest seems like a cruel joke when we have been taught to obtain, persist, and endure. Systems upon systems have been designed to create an illusion of peak productivity and exponential growth, without regard for the human bodies that uphold such ideas.

Instead, we are taught to applaud the grind and celebrate the hustle. A spare moment is time to squeeze in a task, run an errand, or feel shamed for the list of work undone. No time for renewal or healing when the rancid breath of capitalism is breathing down our necks.

But what are we grinding for? And when does the hustle end?

Being the person I am, I needed a philosophical answer to these questions. I needed to know the underlying values of how and why we live this way. I needed a historical perspective because we have been bamboozled in believing that the 40 hour workweek has been around since the dawn of time.

I skimmed through a stack of books from the library on topics related to rest, and ate up anything I could from the Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey. I finally found what I was seeking in a text from my mother-in-law. It was a small, thin book that was gently worn. Across the gold the cover it said: The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel.

The text, published in 1951, eloquently captures the pull of productivity that has increasingly diminished the importance of rest. In poetic language, he describes how our human desire to control has made us obsessed with space and ignorant of time.

When we value only physical space and objects, we give up our sacred right to time—and time is the essence of rest. We forget that being is not achieved through the collection of space but in the connection between all living things—past, present, and future.

As a result, we continue to seek meaning without the ability to create connection. We quest for belongings and innovation, which time renders inherently value-less. We acquire without realizing that our truest desires are bound by the dimension of time.

Rest is the freedom from the things in our physical world that demand our time and attention. It is the disciplined pursuit of nothingness in order to connect us to what is eternal. As Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry has accurately stated: rest is resistance.

“Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

If we continue to examine our relationship to rest, we can open up space for new possibilities. Here are some questions for reflection:

• What is your current relationship to rest?

• How has your relationship evolved through different seasons of life?

• What important lessons have you learned from rest?

• How can you create more space in your life for rest?

You can hit reply to share with me directly or leave a comment on the Substack BGCL page. Thanks for taking time to slow down and be present with me this week. Take care, be kind, and we'll talk soon,