Category Archives: Tricia Hersey

Apr1

Resisting a Rest

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You will see the name of this blog change soon, to A Painterly Life. Let’s face it, it isn’t a blog about home so much as about life. And the content will broaden. We will venture out to explore the beautiful nature I am grateful to live in and near. We will continue to explore lifestyle, particularly through the lens of an aging woman…a creative woman who has survived incest, near-death experiences, growing up in an extremely dysfunctional family in the wild sixties, profound loss, decades of narcissistic abuse, and who is surviving chronic illness. But mostly, a woman who wants to live as open-heartedly as possible moving forward. Moving life forward will be the theme here.

Like most of us, from all walks of life, we are figuring it out as we go along. Our culture is changing fast – as it must. It’s archaic in so many ways. Those of us who long to see a new far more sustainable world for future generations must make serious and often difficult changes – and quickly – to keep our lives moving forward. To feel relative. We must learn to live as a verb rather than a noun.

“I want to learn to live my life as a liquid.” – Cody, Dinner At the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

These days my body and my psyche require an unreasonable amount of rest. I do resist, albeit futilely. I have so much to do. I find myself wondering how anyone works and does everything else, but in truth, we don’t. I didn’t. I ignored more than was healthy to ignore. I lived in a constant state of overwhelm. I suffered in silence, but I also caused an unnecessary amount of suffering in my bull-in-a-china-shop charge through life. But I survived. I’m a survivor.

So are you. And I maintain a foundational premise I have adamantly defended since adolescence – that creativity is the only way through this chaos. Art, to be specific. And art is not a thing, it is a process, a way of life.

And so I aver: ULTIMATELY, IT WILL BE THE ARTISTS WHO SAVE US. You’re not an artist, you say? I beg to differ. Do you problem solve? Art. Cook? Art. Sing when alone in the car, maybe even off-key? Art. Notice the lichen on the fallen log? Artist! Love crisp, clean sheets? Know when something just feels “off”? Have a favorite color? Savor coffee with dessert? I can go on, oh, and I will…stick with me.

Let’s talk about this plaque of deep fatigue, physically and psychologically. Perhaps more so psychically. Don’t think you’re psychic? Well, I will prove that you are that, too. And it is required of us now to acknowledge and develop this atrophied gift. It is part of living artistically. It is part of living.

We are human. We are alive. We are artists. We are now.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JXZzLIjMlcI%3Fsi%3D7gN4ZwNCAGESqKVx
Mar13

the nature of rest

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They call it toxic positivity for a reason. I have a photograph of my family taken in my parent’s kitchen where we are all tan and smiling broadly. We all look so happy. I remember commenting back then that we look like we’re posing for a toothpaste ad. It would be decades before I uncovered the truth of that insight.

We looked happy because we were told to smile. One big happy family. And much of that was true, but not as it was directed – rather, as it was felt, intuitively, unconsciously, in the moment. In glimmers through a child’s heart.

Despite the dysfunction of drug and alcohol abuse, there were also fantastic experiences together as a family. My happiest childhood memories are of long vacations on the boat. We had a Chris Craft cabin cruiser and traveled in caravan with other young families, all over the Great Lakes, through the 1,000 islands of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and to my favorite destination: Georgian Bay, Canada. It was barely populated back then, and is still one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Nature was our sanctuary. Everything moved slowly. We scooped our drinking water from the lake. Spent hours in the hills picking wild blueberries until scared off by a distant bear. Lingered lazy hours away in the sun. I remember swimming underwater as a shortcut from one protruding rock to another, only to surface right under a snake as long as me! (I would later identify it as a water moccasin.) Life was fun and blissful, otherworldly. I purchased my first record album in a little country store on a remote island – Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon. I’d never heard of the singer, but I was fascinated with the drawing on the cover. It looked like something I would draw. Some awareness would wake up in me that summer and my life would never be the same. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?

At the age of 12 my brother Ward was the youngest registered member of The American Power Boat Racing Association. My parents bought him an outboard hydroplane which would have to be weighted to prevent becoming airborne, and he would blur past the back porch practicing for the annual race on the Detroit River. He was having the time of his life.

Ward died last year at the age of 62, apparently of a heart attack in his sleep. I am still reeling from the shock and grief. Ward was not speaking to me at the time of his death. I was hopeful that we would get through that and become friends again in our old age. But Ward’s story is not one of childhood fantasies come true, it is instead of enduring abuse, of giving up cigarettes, of overcoming alcohol and drug addiction, of never being able to kick his gambling habit. It is a story of decades of struggling with mental illness and depression.

Ward was crazy smart. He could fix anything. He didn’t know how to rest. He worked hard all of his life. As it happened, he called his employer and apologized for feeling too sick to work the day he later died. We shared a love of music, especially the blues. He would never have a successful love relationship, he would be homeless from time to time all throughout his adult life. I would kick him out of my home twice, decades apart. I accompanied him to court when unfairly accused of domestic violence for defending himself. He would be violent at times, and he would be the victim of violence. Like me, he would always be a loner and prefer the company of animals to people. I am the eldest of 5 children; he was the fourth born. We had the same parents, grew up in the same house, had some of the same teachers in school. His story and my story are intricately entwined, as are the stories of our other 3 siblings. It feels like a betrayal to tell Ward’s story, and it feels like a betrayal not to. I love my sweet little brother deeply and I will miss him the rest of my life.

Our other 3 siblings will not speak about the abuse in our childhood. So from now on I will only tell my story, and note the common thread, the scarlet thread, the blood that bound us. Perhaps then I will enjoy rest. Until then I will practice rest as resistance. And I will allow nature to be my sanctuary.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aZnySL8XB4w%3Fsi%3DFvv4XQJt-9l-wXOk

“You are exhausted physically and spiritually because the pace created by this system is for machines, and not a magical and divine human being. Your body has information to share with you, but you must slow down to receive it. There is power in knowing you are enough right now and always.” – from The Nap Ministry’s REST DECK by Tricia Hersey

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1T5NuI6Ai-o%3Fsi%3DGn7t5UDcLUStCtll
Mar10

But Mostly, It’s Both…

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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.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WH87f6LkTXc%3Fsi%3D5Kf4cykuHid9oAlQ
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rb67fKALxnw%3Fsi%3DoKBdjfAuKidzh-_t

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” – Rumi