New Moon, October 2024
The body. Sometimes I forget about the body. I try to numb it, to repress its needs, its own voice. And I forget that the body holds knowledge as much as the intellect does: it is a knowledge that comes from the landโconnecting us to the roots of our ancestors and to layers of time and matter.
A few days ago, I listened to my bodyโs voice, which spoke through the non-verbal language of an unborn babyโa future ancestor. They taught me a lullaby, which I now sing for consolation, or to soothe myself into relaxation. I am offering this song to anyone needing it. You may want to listen to it now, as you continue reading this text. (You are also welcome to offer it to others who you feel might need to listen to it too).
The unborn future ancestor told me that they will need this lullaby to be able to face a future world filled with pain, wars, scarcity of resources, and climate collapseโwhich our Global North lifestyle and accelerationist capitalist system has created. But the lullaby is also for us, who are now living in the present time, to be able to slow down and provide support for ourselvesโso that we can better care for others and for the earth.ย
As a future ancestor, I am responsible to do what I can to accompany this world to its best deathโnourishing life โtil the end.
In my queer perception of time and space, this song has been echoing from the Rarฤu Massif, situated in the Romanian Carpathians, which I visited two weeks earlier. While walking on the mountainโs meandering paths, I felt the calling of the human and nonhuman ancestors who inhabited the mountain in the past. I had to stop and sketch the โportalโ that showed up in front of meโa deep opening between the rocks, with a slab of stone sliding downwards. The rocks were grey and white, but I drew them pink, with fiery orange bushes.
I asked the spirits of these rocks what I should learn from them. They replied:
Sometimes learning does not happen. Or, at least, not immediately. Sometimes you just have to listenโbecause learning might only manifest in the future generations. Your ancestors might have not been ready for the learnings they were offered. However, they might have listened to them so that you can now carry that knowledge within you. Are you ready to go deeper?
To go deeper, I need my whole body (and our collective body) to reprogramme and attend differently to the inflexible work culture that requires specific outcomes to be delivered by specific dates. As poet Tricia Hersey (the founder of The Nap Ministry) says: โwe hold ourselves and others to the lie of urgency.โ[1] Everything is urgent, and everything must happen as fast as possible in capitalist times, so that we can keep afloat in an economy that drags us downwards, through the constant promise of accumulation. What have we learnt from the global Covid-19 pandemic in the past few years? Have we reprogrammed the way that we produce, or make art (as many of us promised back then)? Has the system changed at all?
My healer says that the adrenal glands in my body are over-producing because they keep on responding to constant stress stimuli. Adrenal glands should be activated in such ways only in situations of actual threat, but modern work culture has made stress (and the fear of scarcity) a necessary ingredient for us to depend on. In my experience, which is shared by many freelancers in the arts, I often find myself in a perpetual โfight or flightโ mode. I feel that this feeling is exacerbated by the semantic violence of the word โdeadlines.โ Deadlines keep on haunting my fully packed agendaโฆ How can you not be stressed within a system that performatively threatens you with death on a daily basis? Can my body develop the capacity to handle this stress with greater calm and restfulness? Or, as artist and radical pedagogue Dani dโEmilia told me: โHow to find rest within the mess.โ
As I try to envision a restful scenario for myself and others who have forgotten how to find it, more questions come to my mind. When you are ready, pick one of the questions below and write it somewhere. Hold it with you throughout the day, so that you can think and act upon it. Every morning (or afternoon), you can pick another question for the day. In the evening, ask yourself how your body is feeling:
- Where or how do you feel most comfortable? Is this related to a specific person, place, body position, state of being, or community of belonging?
- Who else can rest with you (human or nonhuman)?
- How do you usually rest? Are there other ways to rest that you can access?
- Can you listen and/or feel deeply the bones and other parts of our human and nonhuman ancestors resting in this land?
- When you rest one of your primary senses (e.g., sight or hearing), can you notice if and how your other senses also rest and/or are activated?
- Can a nonhuman animal teach you how to rest more fully?
- Besides sleeping and napping, what else does your body need to rest and heal?
- If rest brings you pleasure, what kind of nourishment (metaphorical or not) enhances that feeling?
- How did your younger self, or even your baby self, rest? Now imagine your older self: will you be resting differently?
- Could you structure your days around rest rather than work? And could work itself become restful?
- If rest had a shape, form, or colour, what would it be?
- How can we share rest with others without compromising their own need to rest?
- How does your rest change when your skin touches the earth or water?
- Do you feel pain or tension in a specific part of your body? Could you make a conscious effort to let it rest?
In How to do Nothing, artist and educator Jenny Odell speaks about how doing โnothingโ should not be at the service of being more productive later on (which is what our capitalist work culture wants us to do), but to be more in tune with ourselves in the present time, with the place we occupy and those who are around us. Due to a fortunate typing mistake, I realised that, with โnothingโ, comes โnotingโ. In noticing the value of so-called unproductive time in our lives, Odell writes that โ[s]olitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.โ[2]
This year, on the last sunny day of summer in London, I laid down in the park near my house with the intention to rest. While facing upwards, looking through the canopy of a maple tree, I noticed a squirrel, who noticed me first. We held gazes for a few seconds before the furry animal jumped back to its activity. I closed my eyes and started drifting, letting the warmth of the sun and the rustling leaves lull me into a peaceful state.ย When I opened my eyes (about twenty minutes later), I found myself surrounded by a profusion of winged maple seeds, chewed and broken in two parts by the hungry squirrel. This unproductive โnothing/notingโ was one of the moments I felt more alive this summer in London, amidst constant โurgentโ deadlines.
Doing nothing is a political act because it resists the unnecessary grind and growth-based modern capitalist economy by slowing downโand bringing the attention back to our bodies-as-land. As podcaster and restoration ecologist Ayana Young said in a conversation with Tricia Hersey, โif we are not slowing down, the Earth will never be able to slow down, because we are pushing the Earth to keep up with this grind culture.โ[3] Therefore, we need to rest, so that the land can also rest with us (thanks to ecotransfeminist artist Niya B for highlighting this). Indeed, the more we rest, the less we need to extract from the earth, or from other peopleโs labour.
Take a pause. And think about every time you rested whilst other people laboured for you, so that you could rest. Think about what other resources have been used to provide rest for you. What ways of resting could allow the land and those who inhabit it to also rest with us?
Rest is resistanceโI echo with Tricia Hersey. When we are resting, we are also resisting or refusing the exhausted, sleep-deprived culture that white modernity has imposed onto everybodyโbut especially onto the racialised and colonised bodies that have historically been constructed as disposable, so that they could be more easily extracted from.
As a white ally who has at heart the liberation of Black, Indigenous, and otherwise racialised people, and the freedom from extractive capitalism for all, I have felt the urgent need to analyse my own implication in reproducing a system of extraction and hyper-productivity in the artsโa field that I love, but whose institutional foundations are racist, elitist, colonial, and ableist. How can curating not reproduce such violence, but rather become an act of actual healingโas per its etymological origin, from the Latin curare, meaning โto care for/take care ofโ and โto healโ?
We are all curators, in one way or anotherโbecause we are all implicated in acts of caring, for ourselves or others (human and nonhuman). How has curating worked for your own ego, or for extractive purposesโrather than for healing relationships?
Brazilian educator and Indigenous and land rights activist Vanessa Machado de Oliveira rightfully calls for recovering our โexiled capacitiesโ by interrupting harmful (internalised) patterns so that we can eventually โsense, relate, and imagine otherwise than what is allowed, encouraged, and rewarded within modernity.โ[4] It goes without saying that this requires us to let go and compost what needs to die, so that it can become fertile ground and nutrient for our lives, and for those who will come after us.
Integrating rest and โdoing nothingโ can in this sense be a decolonial strategy, since when we do less, our environmental impact is also reduced (as we might not be travelling, eating, buying, watching, producing, or selling more products). We should not feel guilty about it (or understand it as a form of escapism, laziness, or egoism), but as a necessary move to sense deeply our interconnectedness with the more-than-human and the sacred. When we rest, we can also create the space for dreaming, imagining, or just โbeingโ outside of the capitalist economy that keeps our bodies and minds tied to the addictions of modernityโto its needs, demands, and pleasure-seeking dependency.
My friends insisted I should try to take a bath: I never do baths, because they take longer than a โquick showerโโso I tricked myself with curating a โbath workshopโ for myself. By candlelight, I soaked my body in the hot bathtub with essential oils, but my breath was still rushing (I now recognise this shortness of breath coming from the stress and anxiety that my work keeps on producing). Then, my breath capacity started expanding: the inhalations became deeper, and the rhythm began to slow down. For a few moments, I went back to the slow breathing that I might have experienced when I was a baby. I promised to return to this breath every time I can. Will you breathe with me?
I realised that when I am rested I can breathe, deeply. Thatโs why I need to offer this letter to myself firstโto recover my capacity to better support the systems Iโm a part of: from the art world I work in, to all those in need, with the hope of becoming better ancestors for the Earth we inhabit.
May we all be able to breathe, love, rest, and live a life that is not based on productivity, growth, and accumulation, but on values of reciprocity and compassion towards the many entangled lives we are formed by and are part of. May this wish reach those that are yet to be touched by it, through never-ending composting rituals. May we all have the strength to open up to the radical potential of looking inwards without losing the connection with the important work that needs to happen outwards, in art, activism, and all other domains of life.
[This letter is based on the reflections that I collected in the past month, as I โenforcedโ 40 hours in a month of โnonproductiveโ time within my daily work schedule. I completed this task around the UK and Romania through various activities, such as napping, writing letters, drawing, observing, meditating, praying, dancing, moon staring, sun-bathing, reading tarot, doing and creating rituals, watching films, reading (for pleasure), receiving somatic therapy or energy healing, walking in nature, taking a bath, connecting to my ancestors, cooking collectively, feeding a fire under the rain, and cat-stroking, among other activities].[5]
Endnotes
[1] Hersey, Tricia (2022) Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. New York: Little, Brown Spark, p.25.
[2] Odell, Jenny (2019) How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn & London: Melville House, p.xi.
[3] For the Wild (2020) Transcript: TRICIA HERSEY on Rest as Resistance /185, 8 June. https://forthewild.world/podcast-transcripts/tricia-hersey-on-rest-as-resistance-185
[4] de Oliveira, Vanessa Machado (2021) Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanityโs Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. Berkley: North Atlantic Books, p.57.
[5] I thank my partner Niya B for helping with the final edit of this text and discussing creative ideas together. Sounds edited and mixed by Gisou Golshani.
