Imagine a world without oppression. There is a powerful movement I am only now learning of as I read Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. The Nap Ministry is compelling us toward stillness because grind culture is killing us before our time.
Author Hersey refuses to “donate my body to a system that still owes a debt to my ancestors for the theft of their labor and dream space. We will have to take a look at the ways in which this culture traumatized us,” she declares. I agree entirely, “…and then begin the lifelong process of healing.” It requires we grieve. If I know anything of grief, it is that we must acknowledge more than the physical loss; we must also grieve the lost potential of what might have been and never was. Imagine a world without oppression. “Grieving in this culture is not done and is seen as a waste of time because grieving is a powerful place of reverence and liberation.”
This book is written from the perspective of a black American woman. She is speaking about a history built upon unrelenting greed, cruelty, and enslavement. I cannot speak about this; I can barely imagine it. I do, however, know oppression. I do know trauma. And I can imagine a world without oppression.
My ancestors owned slaves. I am the direct descendent of more than one founding father, and cousin to more than one American president. When I turned 18 I was courted by the Daughters of The American Revolution. And in my rebellious, bratty, way I told them where they could shove their corrupt theology. But I could do so at no personal risk, couldn’t I? I grew up in the affluent suburbs of Detroit, and my private school classes were cancelled during the riots of ’67. The Vietnam war was on the television day in and day out. Bess Myerson told Mrs. Smith how not to buy war and we talked about it in the kitchen. We wouldn’t buy a used car from that man – but then, we didn’t buy used cars. My parents were listening from the comfort and safety of our home on the hill overlooking the pool and the river. But we were listening. And despite the addictions all that privilege enabled, my dysfunctional parents inadvertently gave us the greatest gift: they taught us to think for ourselves. Always a loner child, I took the horrors of observed injustice to my room. And I thought and thought…the seeds of an inner revolution were being televised.
Like you, my personal story is complex. I am an old woman now. I watch my genius child and my beloved family suffer the ravages of multi-generational addiction and abuse. They think the cancer of their poverty and sickness is about finding the right job or getting the right prescription. They know nothing of the immorality that financed their ancestors. But psychically our bodies know. The DNA remembers; the sins of our fathers have created a legacy of exhaustion.
I still recoil at the political and environmental atrocities perpetuating a dying culture, a culture too far gone. First you have to survive shock to even realize you’ve been traumatized, before you can stop and take a stand and have a hope of healing. From inside a deep knowing of right from wrong, of the healing that comes only with grieving, I identify with Tricia Hersey’s story. We are profoundly tired, and the only way out of this is through grief. It is time to honor ourselves and each other, to still ourselves and listen to the innate wisdom of our sentient bodies. We must learn to be more human. We must rest.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” – Rumi
A Painterly Home 