I like to think of sleep as a spiritual practice. It asks us to trust that if we allow our desire for control to rest, we will be given what we need, and it will be what is best for us. When we say yes to this, we are taken care of: While we seem to do nothing, our brains remove waste that has built up during the day, encode experiences into memories and prune synapses to create space for new learning to occur. Our brains work the nightshift, and our consciousness and will are inhibitors to their work. Sleep requires surrender.
Rest is powerful. Rest is generative. Rest is a creative force. It births new ideas, new projects, new people into the world. It is necessary, a part of the process of it all, when important work is happening. Sometimes, we need to set it all down and come away for a little while.
In this issue, we reflect on rest. One woman shares the way caring for and showing cattle brings her relaxation. We reimagine historical paintings of women reading, a renewing pastime for many, in our photo shoot. And another writer writes about ways she is disengaging from the digital world to live a more analog life. We hope these stories encourage you to take a break and allow space into your life for rest and renewal, surprising you with peace. Space is how the wonder gets in.
After much reflection and prayer, I have decided it is time to set down my work as editor of flourish. This is my last issue editing this publication I love so deeply; it has been joy to create it for the past eight years. The creation process and all it entails has been gift, and I am grateful for all of the beautiful people I have gotten to know, love and be loved by through it. These issues of flourish, as my sister tells me, are a record of the things I thought about throughout my 20s and early 30s, and it means deeply to me to have been given the gift of getting to create them, and to have been given the gift of having these questions, thoughts and learning received by each of you. Thank you. I love you.
My work with flourish has been to cultivate a space that feels like a pause, like breathing, like rest. Rest from other forms of media that so often exist to create want within us and point out our lack; no. Here, we are reminded we are full. That we have everything we need. That free from distraction and noise, we can look around and see real problems and issues and gaps and think critically and creatively and with love about ways to change what we see that is not yet right. We can change what we see that is not yet right. Maybe it is not yet right because we have not yet touched it with love.
Rest allows us to be touched with love. I think often we can be more comfortable clinging to an answer, even if it is the wrong one, than we are with open-ended unknowns. Do not be afraid of the open-ended unknowns. They are where the light gets in. Where the love gets in. Where we find ourselves awash in meaning, in hope, in possibility. This grace we never merited. When it feels unsure, and you don’t know if you are right or wrong, drop the need for answers, and look at Love. This is pause, this is rest, this is reorientation for souls that need singing.
So let us not be chained to the desperation of doing out of fear of the unknown that a pause gifts to us. Our staying away from God is the hardest work in the world, the poet Hafiz wrote, although I may be misparaphrasing and misattributing now. Still. Do not be afraid to set down all you hold, and rest. It will, inevitably, move us back to action, to work that is again aligned with our inmost being, allowing the rest to fall away. The rest allows the rest to fall away.
Thank you for being exactly who you are, and thank you for receiving me exactly as I am. What a great privilege to exist at the same time in this life together.
Joy,
Mia
