Your need for rest is independent of those who need you.  Their needing doesn’t mean you will magically have more to give, or cancel out your tiredness, though so often women act like it does.  We bulldoze over our own self awareness around our energy levels because we are trying to make impossibly dysfunctional systems functional for our loved ones.

Needing rest is yet another phenomenon taught to us best by nature.  Her fallow is akin to our ‘recreation’. I mean, re-creation…as in to create oneself anew.  This is, maybe, a better word than rest, because nowadays rest gets confused with distraction.  “I need rest” translates to “I need to be distracted from the onslaught of responsibilities piling up on my back.”  Indeed, some think scrolling is resting, when in actuality, digesting what is on a screen isn’t rest at all.  Real rest is deep, requiring mind, body and spirit.  It requires peace that can only be born from lack of distraction, rather than cow towing to it.

My whole life I have witnessed imbalance regarding rest.   I’ve seen those who seem uncrushable charge forward heroically time and time again in pursuit of justice and goodness.  I have seen people easily inclined to rest do so indulgently and unapologetically. This inevitably rides on the backs of others whose disinclination to succumb to tiredness enables others toward downright lazy…and I don’t mean the good kind of lazy.  

It’s rare for me to witness humans who balance rest and action beautifully.  This is not a reality I have a right to judge…or declare, “DING DING DING!”-  the achievement of the perfect dance between action and rest.

I’ve come to reflect on nature’s prowess regarding rest as a guide.  Longer, steady down periods balanced by sustained creation and effort.  Day and night, winter and summer, tide in and out.  There is daily rest, seasonal rest, rest around the sometimes cataclysmic happenings life brings, and the rest we seek from the .01% who manage to dictate the constructs of our daily lives and our necessary navigation of capitalism.

I have noticed over the course of my teaching career that today’s youth seem extra fried.  They are constantly exhausted.  I think that is because the division of time into smaller and smaller bites amplified by alerts and bells and whistles is coming at us all at a breakneck pace.  Our youth could use some better modeling of a quality rest/action dance.  It’s incumbent upon us mamas to get this right!  Boy could we use some practice!

So, the Motherline endeavors to learn how to rest, to balance our actions.  We go a bit fallow in July and August, when heat and smoke push us all indoors to air filtered spaces, or away on vacations or family visits.  This is when our gardens are busy growing, refusing to be planted or hoed or turned…fully committed to the act of turning sun and water and soil into beautiful food.  And we rest again in December, when the turn toward winter beckons us inward.

It seems like an oxymoron, to rest when the world needs mother action more than ever.  But that is precisely why we must lay our cheeks down to the earth. We will be back in September, and halfway through our rest we will emerge to experience together the perfect mid summer activity, free to Motherline subscribers, an incredibly empowering Seed Saving Workshop for the home gardener and homesteader, taught by Kalan Redwood of Redwood Seeds on Zoom, in late July,  just for us.  Kalan is a personal heroine of mine, and a foremost authority on saving seeds, but she shares information clearly, generously, and impactfully! There, and after, we can reflect on the importance of saving seed, not only for our gardens, but for our souls, our community, and our planet.