Monday Meditation
Rest as Resistance in an Age of Collapse
“The dream is the same dream that all men have, to step outside the frame of reference in which they have been placed since the moment they were born, to step outside of the safety, the prison, of their fathers’ houses.” — James Baldwin
I am writing from Hudson, NY—another site of homemaking with my boyfriends and collaborators, Jeff and Luke. Jeff and I have just returned from the Wild Goose Festival, an outdoor progressive Christian gathering patterned after Greenbelt in England. These festivals are meant to crack us open, to tether us to possibility. And yet, as I step back into them, I feel the weight of discernment.
Cultivating meaning-making as a vocation requires cultivation and curation. My monastic vision requires both togetherness and queerness, and also the silence and solitude of aloneness. These next two weeks, I will be cultivating presence in that aloneness—writing, listening, and practicing the discipline of rest.
Today, as I settle back into this homeplace for the week, with trail mix, cold brew, cream, and dehydrated mango (I eat like a pilgrim, too), I sit with the notion of Sabbath. My home with my primary partner in Alfred, a movement educator and somatic facilitator, anchors me. It is the hearth that makes possible my sojourning in contested spaces. And yet I am realizing that my call is no longer to contested publics, as it has been for the last ten years. I am improvising an intentional rupture, stepping away from the hegemony of the tyranny of now—a phrase I once wrote about in Activist Theology.
Rest as resistance. This is the phrase my partner and I often return to. It is not indulgence. It is not retreat. It is rebellion. Researched and nurtured by the Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey, this is the deep wisdom I am letting take root in me: to resist the logics of empire by laying down my body, by refusing extraction, by reclaiming time as holy.
Because the truth is this: we are careening toward collapse. We are already living inside the unraveling. The forces of global technofascism are not abstract—they are here, accelerating all around us. And yet, if we can hold onto one another, nurture social trust (which I feel daily as an absence aching in our world), if we can cling to the fragile beauty of our bodies and their need for rest—then maybe we will make it through.
This work of rest, of presence with ourselves, is the very work I am practicing this week and next, even as I prepare for gatherings and events. Sabbath is not luxury—it is counter-hegemonic practice. It is a refusal of the lie that we are only worth what we produce. It is the stubborn insistence that another possible world is not only imaginable, but inhabitable, if we dare to rest long enough to dream it.
If we cannot practice another possible world, how can we imagine it?
✨ Ritual Exhale:
Breathe in collapse.
Breathe out resistance.
Breathe in fragility.
Breathe out presence.
Breathe in exhaustion.
Breathe out rest.
Closing Blessing
“Rest is not a luxury, a privilege, or a bonus we must wait for once we are burned out. Rest is a human right. Rest is a reclamation. Rest is resistance. Rest is saving our lives. Rest is the foundation for liberation.”
— Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry
May we reclaim what empire has stolen.
May we remember our bodies as sacred.
May we lay down and dream another possible world into being.
Roberto, I am so sorry we missed you at Wild Goose! I have loved following you and your story since the time I heard you speak there. I am the one who sent you a prayer shawl because I was so moved. Wishing you holy rest, Judy 💜