Rest as Resistance
"These times are urgent. We must go slow" -African Proverb
Rest becomes resistance when it occurs within an economic system that needs to constantly grow in order to stay alive. Non-forcing becomes radical within a toxic patriarchal culture that is penetrating the body of the earth, the bringer of all life, in order to coerce more and more "resources" out from her, without asking permission.
“In an age of acceleration, nothing is so exhilarating as going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing so luxurious as paying attention.” -Pico Iyer
This past year in the Jewish calendar (Sept. 2014- Sept 2015) was the Shmita year. Just like every 7 day is the Sabbath, a joyful rest for the body and soul, every 7 years is the Shmita year, a rest for the body of the land and a reset for soul of the systems that govern it. During this year all existing debts are forgiven, all private land is commonized, all slaves released, and the fields are not worked, but heal and lie fallow.
My life is an experiment and this seemed like a fruitful one to try, so this year, while living in the basement of a community house in Washington, DC, I tried to observe Shmita, by intentionally under committing my time, striking my student debt, and just plain old doing less. The result has been profound, so I’m here to share what I learned.
The Parable of the Fallow Fields: This year, the farmer didn’t sow seeds in the field, yet the field still grew. Seeds blew in from neighboring fields, ancient seeds lay dormant in every spot of earth just waiting for the open space and proper wetness to crack open and unfurl towards the sun again. The land hosts what she needs to heal. Strange never-before-seen plants grow alongside volunteers from the past years fallen seed. In watching the variety of what starts growing in this field the farmer starts to see it completely differently. Not an it, not an object, not “his property” anymore. The land confronts him now as a living being, with an intelligence all its own.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan: There was this famous experiment where they gave divinity school students a passage to write a sermon on. Half of the students were supposed to write on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and the other half were given some other random text from the bible. Between the place where they were writing the sermon and the place they were to deliver it a person needing help was planted. Who stopped to help this person? The people going to preach on the good samaritan? It turns out that it didn't matter what they were preaching in their sermon. What mattered was how much time they had. The ones that felt like they had time, stopped to help. The ones that were running late, didn't.
Is there something more hopeful for our planet and its people then resting in knowing that there is an intelligence in the land which (given the proper space/time) will do exactly what it needs to heal the soil, and an intact memory within people that we are here to serve each other, which reveals itself again when we have the time and space to be present with each other? More than anything my Shmita year has left me with this knowing. In my fallow field of time sprouted spontaneous noontime coaching sessions with my housemate, more conversation with homeless people and elderly people on the street (the other ones that have "free" time). Caroling, dinners with our next door neighbors who have lived in the neighborhood for 50 years, flipping through hundred year old maps of my neighborhood in the basement of the Library of Congress, a birthday party with my friends and my mom, a committed relationship that I stuck by despite all my attempts as self-sabatoge and fleedom (wanting freedom without responsibility). After a year of intentional non-doing, I now have a sneaky suspicion that all we need to heal this world and build a regenerative culture is common space to gather and open time to be together.
It took me a long time to get to this realization. 9 years ago I was the self appointed child mavrick for the youth Climate Movement. I regularly choose to missed my classes in high school in order to present about global warming to high school classes all around my county in Maryland, spreading the good word about the imminent apocalypse and how we need to fix it before its too late with Clean Energy. We passed bills, and lobbied, and my college switched to 100% wind energy, and composting in the dinning hall. After college I had even sexier, more complex ways of addressing the interconnected crisis and solutions of our time. This time had all of the qualities of adolesence: the idealism, the sense of my own magnificence, and that premonition that something great is supposed to happen.
When the Shmita year started I stepped back from all of these projects. I taught part time at a homeschool co-op in order to make some money, and felt pretty useless. As a person, especially a Male person, in this society, I'm used to being valued for what I produce, problems I'm solving, world's I'm saving. As I sat in my pajama's with a guitar in hand as important DC young professionals who manage the DC Green Jobs Corp, and finance million dollar energy efficiency projects, and fight racism, mingled around me, the "hero fixer" in me was slowly dying. As the year continued I could see how my newfound presence to myself, my housemates, my neighbors, my neighborhood, and family, was worth something. Is this what it feels like to be an adult?
"The world is not a problem to be solved. It is a living being to which we must belong." -Llewelyn Van-Lee
Out of the ashes of the fixer martyr, in the fallow field of intelligent time, grew a healer. I can't fix the world, but I can heal and repair what/who I love in it. My presence can be a gift, and it can also cause harm if I'm not careful with the vulnerability people offer me. So I'm learning this year how to hold a heart with both hands.
Finding Wild Time within a Capitalist Pace: In the early 19th century. Slave owners in the south and southwest had all the credit they wanted in order to buy slaves, they had the cotton gin to be able to process as much cotton as was picked, and so they implemented a system of torture in the slave labor camps in order to turn the human beings they had bought with fictional credit money into as much real money as possible, by overcoming their own will, and making them into the fastest disembodied picking hands they could. A minimum amount would be determined based on how much you picked the first day, and then steadily increased every day. The amount of pounds you were short were the amount of lashes you would get. In this system of torture the slaves hands weren't their own but were driven by an ever quickening pace of Capitalism.
The legacy of this coerced work continues today. No longer with the threat of flesh gashing whips, now with the need to catch up with your interest bearing debt, or the fear of falling behind in the work expected of you. From a young age kids are taught modern, rigid understandings of time with bell schedules, lessons on how to read the clock and know the months of the year, timed tests, and being told by the teacher “You are wasting MY time!” I remember sitting in the back row of class thinking “Why is it YOUR time?!” Time belongs to our teachers, then our bosses, with a metronome set to the industrial capitalist pace that requires stead caffeine hits to keep up.
Oh no, this can’t be right!
Time isn’t money, time is honey (and art).
Time isn’t money, it's spirit and
if you sit beside the fire, under the stars, you can hear it.
Through criss-cross streets, I’ll run like the waters, follow the sun, and pump the souls of my feet.
I could hop on the highway. I could be going 60 miles an hour following my gps toward the wrong destination.
Or I could wait, without hope or light, until the darkness guides me
Through cross hatched streets, under the moon,
A soul beneath every step,
to the pumping heart of wild time.
Time is our most fundamental resource. Reclaiming our democracy, reclaiming collective freedom and humanity starts with reclaiming wild time. In wild time art spontaneously sprouts, healing happens, space is generously felt, change happens so swiftly that it defies the laws of cause and effect.
If we all had the ability to sit still long enough to find out what moves us most, where our truest happiness lies, then the world would look very differently. Once your soul catches up with you there will also be some shit that catches up with you simultaneously. Once you slow down and catch your breath after getting off the rat race pace, the things that you’ve been running away from confront you. This is why we need each other in this process, need to find ways of being together when we choose to let healing wild time heal us. Now that the Shmita year is over and I can really work again, this is what I’ll be working on. Thank you to everyone that has held me as I processed all of it throughout this year, Alan, Adam S., and Adam H., Erika, More Beautiful Book Club friends, Rev. Erik and the Sanctuaries crew, Brittany, Kim, MaryLauren, my Mom and Brother, and so many more.
