the rest

sarah harley

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

– Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”

It’s hard to feel the peace of wild things in the deep winter, when all is white and frozen outside. Branches snap and fall in the ice storm. The trees are bare now, offering neither colour nor canopy, just a stark, silent silhouette against the blue winter sky.

The Midwest winter is wild, cold, harsh, and life-threatening. Across Wisconsin, car doors are frozen shut for days. There’s an ominous creaking in its silence. The foundation of the house sinks deeper under the weight of the snow, packed on the roof. Icicles have formed along the eaves, hanging like daggers.

The wildness of winter is hard to come into at its deepest, coldest, and darkest point.

In my home near Lake Michigan, cabin fever sets in.

My head is thick with worry about the simplest tasks. How to get batteries for the faltering thermostat. They are running low. How to open the garage door. The keypad battery has died.

“Extreme cold temperatures will kill the battery,” a man tells me on the phone.

My own battery feels depleted, even though we’ve had two snow days, a national holiday, and now a cold day. I taught only three days out of the last eight and yet, I feel exhausted. Tired to the bone. My mind is dull with a fog, it’s hard to focus. I’m cold but my cheeks are flushed and my lips are chapped. I need to move to a different place. I cannot concentrate.

I think I have left my body, inhabiting only the empty corridors of my mind, filled with worry and doubt, fear and anxious loneliness. Flickering light bulbs and shadows in doorways. My mind is a chamber of ghosts.

Ennui and cabin fever have set in.

I have a thudding headache. I must be dehydrated. I feel depleted of life. Perhaps I have Covid.

I woke at four but stayed in bed for a while, snuggled in the soft, silent solitude of the morning’s early light. It’s my favourite time of the day, before despair for the world grows in me.

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Dear Anxious Part of Me,

I know you’ve had a rough few days, filled with stress and worry, and work pressure. You’ve been pushing away some sort of deep sadness inside. Is it loneliness?

I can’t decide whether your anxiety is the result of too much thinking or too much feeling, or cycling between the two in an unbalanced and chaotic way.

I hope you can find some time to rest, step out of the hustle, to see that doing nothing is more restorative than trying to do everything and never taking time to relax.

Please take time to rest!

I know that your anxiety provides an undercurrent, the hum of productivity and purpose. But what if your purpose was stillness and silence?

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I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly

– Mary Oliver, “Sleeping in the Forest”

I thought the earth remembered me, arranging herself around me, in deep brown folds like velvet. In early summer, I love to sleep outside, always sleeping as never before, alone in my tent at the edge of the pines. My tent is pitched on the forest floor, on a carpet of fallen evergreen needles. I always pitch the tent half in shade, half in sunlight.

The forest always takes me back, kindly and tenderly, as if I’d never left. She wraps herself around me as a lover would. After long absences, we rediscover our understanding of each other.

In the warmth of the summer afternoon, I climb up into my hammock, stretching my legs and feet toward the sky. It always feels as if I am taking a first breath.

My limbs lengthen, I feel lithe, light, and free. My mind slowly clears as thoughts drift away with the birdsong. Flutter of moth wings at night, sparks from a fire.

I love to sleep outside in the peace of wild things.

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I was heartbroken when we went camping together. For the first time, I felt alone in your company. You cracked beer after beer, staring into the fire. An emptiness took hold of you. By nightfall, you fell asleep in the chair, your mouth slightly parted. You had grown old over the course of the evening.

I left you and wandered alone through the woods, down to the lakeshore. I crossed the sand dunes, edged with beach grass, following a beam of yellow light cast by the nearby lighthouse. Through the darkness, I heard the night around me—the call of a nighthawk, the haunting trill of an owl. I wanted to share these sounds with you and so, admitted that loneliness had come over me.

I stood there, hearing the waves, feeling and healing.

Back at camp, I tried to sleep, but my mind was turbulent. While you slept soundly beside me, I lay there grappling with the deep certainty that we would not make it. There was a heaviness in the air – a sense of imminence: we would not last. I felt unbearably alone next to you, lonelier than I ever was on my own.

By morning, I had vanished. I was no longer your girl.

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The hustle begins at 6 am, when the alarm goes off. When the hustle is high, it begins earlier. My brain cannot remain asleep for longer than three or four hours, waking at 1:03 am. I frown at the neon green letters on my fitbit wristband. For a moment, I wonder if it is the time or the date as the number feels unreal. I also use the device to monitor my sleepwalking, how many steps I have taken in my sleep. The number of steps helps me to gauge the exhaustion I feel.

When I wake, I check my score for sleeping, based on my heart rate, and minutes spent awake or restless. I hope to get a score above 79 but that is not always the case. I often score in the “fair” range because too much tossing and turning lowered my score. I only scored “excellent” twice. Once was a few days after meeting you, when you whispered goodnight over the phone and told me I was your girl.

During the day, the device reminds me to move and buzzes cheerfully when I do, flashing that I am in a zone. That usually happens when I am not in a zone but rather flitting distractedly from one task to another. The device counts steps and measures movement and inactivity, delivering a red warning if movement dips below an optimal level.

Moving and hustling are not the same. Hustling is getting stuff done, filling the boxes, completing the tasks only to add more to a never ending list of tasks.

The hustle denies the peaceful rustle of leaves, stopping all rest in its tracks. Hustle culture, such as the one I live in, defines success along a toxic continuum of doing more, filling time rather than spending time.

In college, I read Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, trying to follow his precept: Go deeper into the life you have. I thought about ways to move from an aesthetic phase of life to something beyond. Beyond the life in which each day reminds you of the one before.

I was a still person, reading Martin Heidegger, reflecting on being and time, the title of the magnum opus of the German philosopher. I still remember sitting in a stark white lecture room trying to grasp the meaning of being-in-the-world while developing a belief that my own authenticity mattered more than anything.

The hustle doesn’t care about authenticity or being-in-time. The hustle cares only about being-in-the-task, making your way through the rungs of the wheel, over and over.

The opposite of the hustle is a quiet forbearing space—peaceful, reverent, slow.

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Inside the deep woods, paper letters and lucid dreams. I want to build my faith in something larger than myself. An oak tree. An ancient forest. Even a pebble brought home from the beach.

In building my faith, I could release my worry and fear, let go, and learn to trust.

Through trust, I want to leave the spiral, the looping recurrent thoughts of self-doubt.

In the place of doubt, I could build my own confidence and sense of self.

I want to remember my connections to the woods and forests of childhood, silent places where the only sound was the aria of birdsong, the crackle of a branch, a crunch of leaves.

What happens when I slow down and try to align myself with the rhythm of the seasons?

Pale blue sky, ice along branches. Thin lines of snow after the storm. You can learn the direction of the wind by observing where the snow remains. This time, the snow came from the north. Maybe snow always comes from the north.

Outside there’s sunlight falling in geometric shapes upon the fallen snow. I can’t find a word in my mind for the colour. Snowy white? Paper white?

In the living room, the plants are bright green, forming a wall of leaves pressing against the cold windows. Through the window, an unraveling robin’s nest is tucked inside the eaves of the roof.

The room feels shivery. There’s only silence to hear, bitter black coffee to sip. The skin across my hands looks pale and papery. I have the hands of an old lady.

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Dear Body of mine,

I write to thank you for everything, for housing my soul, my spirit – my life force. Thank you for housing my fears and worries, my exalted moments of joy. You are my home in the world.

I know I haven’t always been kind to you, shaming your reflection in the mirror with thoughts and words. I know I spent time worrying about your flaws more than your virtues: spider veins, cellulite, stretch marks. They all faded away the moment I stopped focusing on them.

I’m sorry for the times you were in danger, always at night, mostly on a bed. You deserved protection but that was not always within my reach.

It has not always been easy for me to love you.

A deep and abiding belief in my own unlovability was established when we were both small, when your legs were longer than the rest of you.

When you left adolescence and entered womanhood, you always resembled a mermaid. Pale shoulders, long red hair. Green eyes, far-set and slanted.

Sometimes I wanted to drown you.

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I yearn for a silence to govern me, an enveloping silence with the quality of an emotion.

My mother never rested during the day, forever on hands and knees scrubbing and mopping, save for completing the crossword in the newspaper, leaning against the kitchen counter. Now and then, she glanced up to watch the starlings in the cold wind. For my mother, rest only came at the end of the day, inside the brown threadbare chair, where she smoked cigarettes and knitted, a small brown bottle of beer close by.

My father never imparted the idea of rest to me. He was a restless man, always pacing and working, digging at the far end of the garden, turning the black earth with the old pitchfork.

My father never rested.

I need to work on my own practices, developing a stillness that can hold me afloat like water.

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Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that resting is a precondition to healing. He talks about the art of resting and how to manage the habitual energy drain of worrying. Just sit and do nothing. Feel that you are alive!

I feel afraid to dwell in the present moment.

Animals know they have to rest in order to heal, to find quiet and stillness. I want to learn how to rest like an animal in a forest, curled up peacefully in the hollow of a tree.

The forest animals understand that healing happens often when you are alone, in the dark and silent solitude of a foxhole. Healing and stillness are aligned.

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When I don’t get much sleep it’s hard for me to focus. My moods go up and down more than usual. Eyes feel wide and dry.

I love to sleep, especially the escape it affords. I possess the art of sleep, of deeply falling away to another place, an elsewhere.

As a child, I mostly slept well. Or I should say, I fell asleep well. Remaining asleep was difficult as I often woke up in the middle of sleepwalking through the house and sometimes in the garden. To anyone who found me, I appeared to be awake during the episode. In the morning, I could not remember.

When I was an older child, sleeping became harder as my mother and father were often arguing through the walls. Objects were thrown, smashing to pieces. I lay there worrying, filled with alternating bouts of anxiety and dread. I feared my mother would leave as she always said she would.

Then one day in June, she was gone. Cancer. I was 13.

A twelve word refrain.

After her death, I slept deeply—a sinking, enveloping escape from the grief I woke up to and did not understand.

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The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.

– Margaret Atwood

What am I ignoring mentally that I feel emotionally?

I think I am mentally ignoring loneliness. Distracting myself and suppressing my emotions rather than addressing them directly. I wonder if my fatigue and spaciness are really my body’s expression of loneliness, an exhaustion arising from an absence of love.

I see it now. I replaced love with freedom, letting go of my desire for it as a final illusion. A fading has happened, a letting go. Sometimes it feels like freedom but it also feels like desolation.

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Once the world was perfect.

– Joy Harjo

I loved a man deeply once. I took our love for granted, falling a sleep next to him, my small face against the palm of his hand. I took the safe place that was him for granted, imagining it would be there forever.

Instead, I reached a sadness that threatened to last a lifetime. A soft blue light with which to start the day. The sadness felt like a normal part of my life. I counted the days as if doing so would bring me back to him.

Eventually the time spent longing for him passed. An emptiness took the place of the sadness such that I missed the nights when I cried myself to sleep. On those nights, he was closer, almost in reach. He was closer to me. But then he was gone.

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I am trying to incorporate small periods of rest into my week. Small moments—tasting the coffee, going for a walk, sitting on the porch with my knees tucked into my chest. Opening the window next to my desk to invite the cold air in. The air flows quickly over the pages of the notebook. I can see my hair blowing in the corner of my eye.

I always waited for you on the porch. You told me to be ready there, waiting, as if I was a child you were picking up. But that’s all over now. We hardly speak anymore.

Rest, space, light. When we first broke up, I felt a sorrow that made it hard to breathe, as if crushed by my own sadness and the general weight of the collapse of us.

I had very little motivation to do anything. I rested a lot, hoping the pain of losing you would go away in time. I laid on my bed, often the floor, staring into the ceiling hoping for a way to escape the pain that didn’t involve taking my own life. I wanted to live. I just wanted to live without pain.

We were done.

One day, I threw away all the clothes that reminded me of you. I stuffed them into plastic bags in the same manner my father had thrown away my mother’s clothes after she died.

“Such a damn waste,” my father said without emotion. He didn’t fold the dresses or take them from their hangers in a gentle way. Instead, the dresses were torn down, hangers and all, and stuffed into bags.

Once the dresses were gone, the bottles were in clear view, lined up carefully next to each other—my mother’s horizon of numbness. Some were half empty, others half full. My father seized them, smashing them into the bags on top of the dresses. In this way my mother’s dresses were destroyed, rendered forever unwearable. He was done with my mother.

The wardrobe stood empty. I wanted to climb into it and enter another world altogether. I wanted to rest.

When my father left the room, dragging the bags behind him, I stared at my mother’s small bed where she had died in the night. I imagined myself lying on the bed, staring at the same ceiling my mother stared at. But she was done with all that now.

I walked from her room, down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the back door into the wide expansive air of a new day without my mother.

All days would follow this one.

Rest, love, rest.

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I looked for a constellation in the night sky that had never been there before. The star I would find would remind me to love myself.

I looked for a finale. A dark blue curtain.

My mother looked at the crumpled ripples of a blanket and had to smooth it over. Always in anger.

We weren’t allowed to rest as children because doing so crumpled things. All forms of rest were considered a practice in indolence and laziness.

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Reflecting on how to achieve a balance between the rest and the hustle as prioritizing one seems to take from the other.

When I put rest first, tasks pile up to the point of stress. On Monday, I woke up in the middle of the night to fold laundry and match socks. It was an uninteresting task so it didn’t run the risk of fully waking me. After putting it away, I went back to sleep for a couple of hours, only to wake up completely exhausted.

At work, we discussed the benefits of biphasic sleep patterns. I learned that others are also up in the middle of the night performing mundane tasks, putting away teacups, folding blankets. These were not quiet nocturnal tasks, such as thinking and rumination, not enough to engage the mind but enough to subdue the part that wanted to attend to a mindless task, the part of the mind that had woken up.

Biphasic sleep, in which sleep occurs in two separate phases throughout the day or night, exists across history and culture. Birds and insects are biphasic sleepers.

Polyphasic sleep occurs throughout the day.

A newish buzzy phrase is “bedrotting” which, despite the terrible name, aims to restore healing through rest.

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I read an entire forum discussion about it.

“So you just lay in bed then?” someone asked.

Counter trends are in the headlines, questioning the health benefits of the practice. US News recently weighed in on the possible negatives of spending all day in bed, arguing that remaining bedridden may have adverse effects.

A New York Times article recently asked how long is too long to stay in bed. The answer? Listen to your body. Get some source of natural light to establish circadian rhythms.

19th century Scots used to hurkle-durkle, another expression floating around on social media, meaning to lounge in bed, long after it’s time to get up.

Apparently we need a trend to rest now.

While practicing resting, I binge-watched Netflix shows about the mind, each episode delving into a hidden aspect—creativity, mindfulness, emotions, psychedelics. I fell asleep, resting in the dark silence of the living room, under a soft blanket, a gift from a friend who wants me to rest more. As I was falling asleep, I learned that the part of the brain responsible for task completion and productivity is the prefrontal cortex. This is the same part of the brain that abhors uncertainty and ambiguity.

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The wild things are said to live outside us, on a wing, somewhere out there, in the wild blue yonder. But the wild things also live inside us, sometimes buried, muffled beneath the days’ endless tasks like a type of emotional congestion.

When we try to find the wild things, sometimes all we see is ourselves.

I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

– Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”

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