Tara K. Shepersky is a contemplative walker, writer, & photographer based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Her first book is Tell the Turning, a collection of poetry with pen-and-ink illustrations by Lucy Bellwood.

I heard a poem today, and I fell in love. It’s called Things to Think, by Robert Bly. I must get it by heart on my next walk. It resonated so strongly with my ruminations shortly before I heard it, on a mini-roadtrip undertaken in the day’s middle hours. 

I had met a friend for lunch, on the other side of a spine of low, arid mountains near the sea. I got there by car in the conventional way: there’s a many-laned freeway that connects coastal plain to valley in about five minutes (when the traffic’s light). I returned — having planned this with happy anticipation — via a series of one-lane backroads. A question I was considering as I did this: why do I go out of my way, whenever I can, to travel on backroads?

It isn’t just aesthetic, though there’s that in it too. Today is not an example. This is the sere season in Southern California; my route is mainly brown, dry, blasted. People talk about winter as the time when the bones of the land show through, but here that’s summer, which lasts until the rains come. Sometimes that’s January — or the January after that.

So why else? I answered as if conversing with myself: They get me off the freeway. They make me read the map. Or get off the map, and navigate for myself. 

And that’s it, literally and metaphorically. In a material act that you do with your hands, feet, and senses, driving a backroad requires you to re-examine your known ways of getting places. 

They take longer, backroads. You have to brake, coast, pass, get passed, take very sharp curves quite slowly. If there’s construction or an accident, you’re far from surface streets, so you just have to wait. Cruise control doesn’t work for long, and there’s little zoning out. 

The act of backroads-driving can be — it was for me today — an incantation, a declaration of intent to seek a new path. Or an old path perhaps, but one with wisdom you haven’t yet encountered. Or wisdom you’ve forgotten.  

There’s a lot of time on backroads journeys for observation. It is not, for example, only brown and blasted out here; I’m noticing the sea-born haze that hangs in the air (all day), and the way every color is hazy too: the sky a heathered bluish taupe; the chapparal and citrus trees a muted olive green. Even the ocean is a dusty sort of turquoise, like someone dug it out of the mountain five minutes ago, and left it lying. 

Noticing, I realize: this is what I want.

I mean that I want this road specifically, and many like it, today and tomorrow and the days after that.

And I mean, in the larger and metaphoric sense, that I want to get off the freeway. I want to find new and slower ways through my life. 

My life has half-a-dozen standard lanes, all blazing along well over the speed limit. The one that concerns us here is my creative practice: a reasonably well-established, regular and crucial part of my everyday routines. A well-maintained fast-track to who I want to be.

The inertia of this lane is strong. I suspect this is because it is successful, by the definition I previously set for success: I have written a book of poems, which is currently being edited and illustrated and produced, in an intensely beautiful and gratifyingly official way, by a small team of wonderful human beings. I love this book, and I love the making of it, every stage.

Staying in this lane creatively seems natural, feels good. It worked, didn’t it? It’s telling me exactly how to do what I most want to do, which is make the next book.

I recently finished assembling 100+ poems into a manuscript draft of the next book. Though there is much (much) work left to be done, I have already revised and polished most of them significantly. And I have made a first attempt at structure. I have printed out a thing that looks like a book-in-the-making, and now I have a satisfying stack of physical paper that has let me remove from the internet, and engage entirely with hand, pen, lips, tongue, breath, body, word, rhythm, and form.

And it isn’t working. 

Back from the backroads and crunching some day-job data, I have stumbled upon — in that lovely serendipitous way that feels like a sort of benign divine intervention — the exact interview I needed to hear. Martin Shaw, a storyteller and mythologist, interviewed Mark Rylance, a stage and screen actor. Rylance talked about creative integrity from one performance to another, employing a metaphor of “reheating the meal.” When you do something well, and you can feel you have done, and people come up to you and tell you how good it was, you think: Great! I will do that again. And then you do it again, and it’s stilted and it doesn’t work. 

So I have some words now for my realization: I don’t want to reheat the meal. My next book (next project) cannot be Tell-the-Turning-with-different-themes. 

What is it then? I don’t know! Which is why I’ve decided to take a break from Shaping it. 

Rylance says in the interview: “focus on your intention,” rather than “the memory of the form.” I don’t know what my intention is, even, for the next project. So I’m waiting. 

“Waiting” sounds passive, which makes me uneasy. But in fact this particular waiting isn’t passive. It’s perfectly active — it’s just not art.  

A poet — any artist — needs to be consistently exploring the subjects, themes, and patterns that give them life, that root their art in the necessary and true. By “explore,” I do not mean “produce art about.” I mean physically engage with a thing itself, not analyze or make accessible, or otherwise publicly represent that thing or the experience of it. 

This hands-on, all-in exploration is a pre-requisite for art. But it is not art and it does not necessarily lead to art, either. If it has a goal outside itself, that goal does not serve our egos or advancement.

In the exhaustion of pandemic and depression, I have been pushing hard to produce art. And neglecting, in that process, these explorations. 

For example, I have not been walking. Granted, it’s too hot for me in summer to walk for hours. But that seasonal loss ought to be attended, and mitigated. I’ve barely noticed.

I have also let my journal go. Where I used to channel enormous flows of imagery, effort, leisure, and love into my personal writing — which I do for play, and which never has an audience —  instead I’ve been pouring all of that into poems for publication. I can do both, of course. But I can tell (now that I’m attending) that the two are out of balance. My journals from the period of writing Tell the Turning are full and vibrant. My journal as I’ve Gathered and begun to Shape the next book? Nearly empty. 

And I have largely forgone my habit of taking the literal backroads. 

In consequence of all this neglect, I have forgotten how, as Bly’s poem has it, to “think in ways you’ve never thought before.” I’ve remained on the freeway, in my creative lane.

Having noticed all of this, I have already begun to repair it. 

What sort of art will come, eventually, to fill the expectant, active space I’m leaving as I press pause on the next book, and instead resume exploring? 

Tell the Turning was invited into being with a handwritten letter. What will make the next invitation?

Faith is not some kind of literal belief. Faith is trusting. Trusting, in this case, my own self, to do what my soul and my body need to survive — and if possible, eventually, to thrive. Trusting the creative process I love, that I’m still discovering. 

And perhaps there is a new phase to the process of making a given creative work. I’ve identified The Gathering, The Shaping, and The Singing. Is this The Resting?

What would The Resting consist of, so I can look out for and encourage it when it’s needed? 

Get off the freeway. Take the backroads. Fall in love with a poem or two — or a person, perhaps, or a season. Wait. Watch. Do the non-art things that make you you. 

A response — like a storm, or the fog rolling in, or the sun cracking through — is surely coming, on a future shift in the wind. 

I pay attention to winds. I’ll be able to smell it. 

Tara K. Shepersky is a contemplative walker, poet, & photographer based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Her first book is Tell the Turning.

This is the latest installment in Tara’s monthly column about the creative practice.

If you connect with Tara’s work, consider supporting her Patreon. You can also write her a letter via The PenPalProject. 

When my husband came home from work the other day, I didn’t hear our startlingly loud garage door banging closed. I was wading with all my faculties through an Old English text, and I didn’t hear anything until his voice said, tentatively, “Baby?” — at which point I leapt from my chair, shouting surprise, to find he’d materialized in the doorway.

This is a pretty common theme, right? Human brains work like this: we get absorbed in a thing; we forget our surroundings; we can, in this state, become easily startled by the world’s intrusions. Here’s the thing, though: I am always startled by the world’s intrusions, even as I’m also always bracing for them. It’s pretty rare for me to be so focused that I’m not braced for interruption, not attuned to each shift in my environment.

Some of this is just how I’m made: intense and sometimes painful sensitivity to (especially) sound, movement, temperature, scent, and my own body-state are nothing new for me. But for the rest of it… I wasn’t always like this. 

As a child, I had hours of focus in me: for reading a book, observing the life of a river, completing homework, playing elaborate games of make-believe. I’ve watched, for some years now, my adult capacity for focus shrinking with the malignant growth of the attention economy, but (by dint of conscious effort) I retained, until recently, the ability to summon it at need. 

What’s changed? Who knows; the possibilities are many, and compounding. A year-and-a-half (and counting) of living in a house where my sensitivities feel always under attack. A significant diminishment of my accustomed solitude. A tendency to anxiety-response. A year-and-a-half of pandemic trauma, experienced alongside the entire world. The depression that’s finally descended from all of the above. 

The cause is important, certainly, but surviving is more so. Thriving, in whatever ways I can, but most crucially: healing. Which is less an event than an an ongoing process. 

For several months, I’ve been thinking a lot about rest: what it even is, how to make space for it. One of the habits I’ve observed that creates rest is focus. Actual rest is so much more likely to be available when my attention isn’t trying to split itself two or ten or twenty ways. 

From this understanding, I’ve departed on a quest — gently, slowly, which is difficult — to regain my dangerously fragmented attention. 

My creative practice, of course, is a place to start with this. You’re familiar with most of that advice. Turn off the internet, choose an time and stick to it, find a place by yourself, set a timer, et cetera. All of that is useful. 

My daily internet habits are another good starting point. Following Cal Newport’s research and some of his advice (while holding at bay his obsession with optimization), I’ve limited my social media, email, and mobile phone engagement to a couple of times a day, and I’m shifting toward conversation (on a phone, on a porch, by letter) instead of more constant and shallow connection (by text, on Twitter or Instagram, et cetera). This is — I was surprised — not easy, and I have to begin again pretty often. But, gradually, it’s helping.

Here’s another thing that helps, while also sideways-benefiting my creative practice: learning. I mean the intentional, semi-formal kind. I mean studying. 

I’m not actually any good at studying. In school, I was the kid our educational system tends to serve best: I’m good at memorizing, I like formal learning, I’m white and I grew up middle class. Also, I had a deeply loving home, where both human and material elements supported the conditions I need to thrive. In college, I re-created those conditions suprisingly well. (I also I returned to my parents’ calm home for regular recharging.) 

College is where I came to understand — mainly by watching my fellow scholarship recipients — that I had no idea how to study. I read the material, I asked questions, and I paid attention in class. I’m naturally good at consuming, making connections between, and re-purposing information — so long as I’m interested in that information, and have some existing facility. Subjects that don’t fit that description (statistics, for example, or chemistry) I had no idea how to learn. Where I was allowed to do so, I avoided them. Subjects I was good at, but required regular and rigorous attention to excel in (Latin comes to mind) I took as far as they were easy for me, and then I dropped them.

If I didn’t know how to do something already — including, apparently, studying — trying and failing embarrassed and confused me. I had no idea how crucial short-term failure is to long-term success. I graduated summa cum laude, largely because distinction was more important to me than challenge. And challenge, at the edge of your existing abilities, is where the learning happens. 

Cut back to me, at 37, deciding to study Old English. Also SQL.

Why these two subjects particularly? Different reasons. Old English I am not unfamiliar with, although certainly I don’t read it. It interests me; it can already hold at least some of my attention. I speak and read much better Spanish, so if I’m going to study a language, why not that? I suspect, unflatteringly, it’s because no one is going to ask me to actually speak in Old English, to understand and to be understood. Spanish, on the other hand, is a living language. In other words, I’m still embarrassed. 

SQL is something everyone I work with knows, and uses on a regular basis. I am fortunate to work for a company that allocates time for training, and money to pay for it. I decided on SQL because it’s useful to my data-based job. And because the basics are easy to grasp: they’re very much English, just in streamlined programming form. Building on them follows logically, without too much need for synchronous instruction.

Both of these subjects allow me to build a new structure on skills and predispositions I already have. I’m not starting from nothing. Small successes — very motivating — are easy to achieve. But I’m also not coasting on what I know already; I’m actually learning.

Nor do I have a goal of official achievement. I have tended in the past to conflate “learning,” particularly “learning a language,” with realized accomplishment — in the case of language, speaking or reading fluently. I have tended to get discouraged when I don’t master the subject with relative ease and dispatch. 

Understanding that learning is a process, and specifically not an achievement, has helped me to embrace study as an end in itself. As play. 

This in turn has motivated me to keep studying: I learn a small skill or a piece of knowledge, I apply it to a text or a database, I get a result. If it’s wrong, I go digging, find what I missed, and try again. I succeed in translating a line, or retrieving the information I requested. I clap my hands excitedly and beam at the empty room. I’m having fun. 

And in all of this, I am absorbed. My focused attention, brain and body, is required for learning at the edge of my ability. For the duration of a study session, time, stress, and responsibilities all cease to exist. For the duration of a study session, I am working — and also, perhaps, I am resting.

Studying is also making me a better poet. Or at least — since, what does “better” mean, regarding poems? — I can say objectively that it is helping me focus more when I sit to revise. 

I think it’s also allowing me to access new ideas. Studying something not related to art takes my mind off that art (and off my stressors), long enough for my mind to rest and process. It’s maybe like a nap for the creative brain. (Actual sleep is also critical, perhaps including actual naps.) 

On the other side of that break, my mind is fresher, more interested, more focused. It’s not suddenly raring to write poem in Old English, or about databases or in the form of a query. But new pathways are opening in my poetry because I’m intentionally opening new pathways in my learning. You could call it sympathetic magic. 

Like all magic, it’s specific, it compounds, and it’s work. And like all magic, it’s powerful enough to unlock important doors. Like, for example — and probably I should add “perhaps;” I’m not so far on my quest yet — rest.

Tara K. Shepersky is a contemplative walker, writer, & photographer based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Her first book is Tell the Turning, a collection of poetry with pen-and-ink illustrations by Lucy Bellwood, to be published this autumn by Bored Wolves.

This is the latest installment in Tara’s monthly column about the creative practice.

If you connect with Tara’s work, consider supporting her Patreon. You can also write her a letter via The PenPalProject. 

Martin Shaw gave an interview* last winter, from deep in the UK’s first lockdown, in the who-knows-anything time before Covid vaccines. Someone in the virtual audience asked about trauma: what do you do with it? “Get to moving water,” he said. “And sit there. And sit there. And sit there.”

On the banks of a creek who wishes to remain anonymous, I am sitting. It is mid-day, it is not cold, and my creekbank “belongs” to a U.S. State Park. Which is to say that it would be crowded — as it is, at its nearby confluence with a medium-sized river — but I have rolled my pants and taken my chances with slippery rapids and teetering log jams. Here upstream I am not alone, but neither are there any other humans in sound or sight. 

I have been here a while: watching dragonflies and hummingbirds, and columbine nodding above an undercut bank; reading a letter from a friend; listening to the breeze changing its mind from downstream to up. 

I find I am saying to myself it’s time to go. It does not feel like time to go, it just seems like the next thing. I’m addicted to progress. But I have got here, to moving water. My own wellspring, in fact. I slide my feet in the creek, skin on stone. Sit here. Sit here. Sit here. 

I came here to write poems. Here, in this case, is a wider locality: a particular gathering of river/forest/ocean margins, my favorite place in all the world so far. I cleared a space on my calendar, found a one-room cabin, and hung on by my gritted teeth until the day arrived to make the journey. I am writing a book — no one is surprised — and so I have told myself that is the purpose of the trip. 

I came to write poems, and I am writing poems. Creating is a primary way I encounter and explore; I can’t not do it. To do it well, I need space. I write from spaciousness. Here is space. Here, in fact, is home. This place is a great love of my life. I am writing poems; of course I am writing poems.

But I cannot only write poems, only be a poet. If I didn’t have to make money, this is what I say I would want to do—but poet is an identity that cannot exist alone. A writer of any kind must have something to write about, or all the love and skill and dedication have nowhere to flow, no work in the world to do. 

I have plenty of work in the world. I’m conflicted, confused, frustrated, or downright despairing about all of it. Some of it is worthy, I don’t doubt. Much of it is pure garbage: concerned only with money and obligation. I am looking for more that fits in the first category, yet I can’t imagine taking on more, period. I’m exhausted. I’m traumatized. I’m depressed. I’m ashamed and angry even to write those words. How can they be me? I’m better than that. 

So. My obsession with progress says I’m here to write poems, to make something I can point to with my name on it. But really, I’m here to sit by moving water. I am here to rest. I’m here to excavate — patiently, kindly, bravely, if I can — who is this person who is not, in fact, better than, or even okay. 

The several voices of the creek are just what I need. I listen to them — really listen, separating them mentally, and noting their pitch and volume. They’re not saying anything. They’re saying everything.

Possibly this is not a time to make sense of things. But I — like humans everywhere, and especially like humans who find their deepest work in art, in priesthood, in leadership — am a meaning-maker.

Just now, I was gathering stones. This beach is 98% stones. The longer you look, the more interesting they get. I would name aloud one of my roles or labels, and search for a stone to match it.

A palm-width stone, shaped like a lightning bolt and faced with quartz.

A slick black circle, split almost in two, like a broken-heart emoji.

A smooth and water-polished oval, warm brown and soft grey whirled togther.

A tiny, tumbled pebble, red as a berry, vivid. I perched it on top of a deep green rippling globe.

Each stone I held let me hold at arm’s length a role I inhabit or a label I’ve acquired: things I am, things I am called in certain contexts, and things I kind-of-am, because words for our experience are a collective obsession of a culture trying to re-found itself.

When I ran out, finally, my hand was overflowing: a strange beach offering, word and rock balanced on palm and fingers. I picked them back up, one at a time, and cast them to centerstream, saying to the stone and its label: You are loved here. You are held here. You are worthy. It’s okay if I don’t understand you. You are anchored here. 

I am home on this creekbank: sitting, walking, resting. Making up rituals and scratching out poems. Not figuring myself out, just watching me be. Asserting that’s okay, and learning to believe it — a process, not an accomplishment I am claiming. 

This creek, its river, its woods, its ocean-perfume — this is the one landscape where I belong, in a way I’ve tried to understand all my life, and I no longer need to. I cannot only belong here, only be here. Home and belonging must have some work in the world to do, too. 

For this long summer moment, though? I can rest awhile yet. 

*This is a fine introduction to Shaw’s work, if you’re not familiar. Though the quote I’m referring to comes from a sort of joint interview with Paul Kingsnorth, moderated by Point Reyes Books.

Tara K. Shepersky is a contemplative walker, writer, & photographer based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Her first book is Tell the Turning, a collection of poetry with pen-and-ink illustrations by Lucy Bellwood, to be published this autumn by Bored Wolves.

This is the latest installment in Tara’s monthly column about the creative practice.

If you connect with Tara’s work, consider supporting her Patreon. You can also write her a letter via The PenPalProject. 

I keep trying to give my recent poems the same title. Rest Awhile* has offered itself three times in the past year, for very different poems. Unadorned Rest showed up three times in the last month. When a title seems to fit all over the place, it is not in fact a title. It’s a message.

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A friend told me today I am her patron saint of walking. I love this, and also, I’m feeling distinctly un-saintlike lately. The type of walking that’s earned me this identity is passionate, exploratory, semi-aventurous, regular, and done at some length. I’ve still got the “regular” part down, but currently the rest of it’s out to lunch. Along with my ability to feel, or enjoy, most things.

I went for a hike the other morning in a favorite landscape. After climbing perhaps a thousand feet (slowly, my main speed these days) — through pine and lupine and springtime grasses starting to go gold, through my new, strange bubble of inertia and indifference — I finally had something like a feeling: a distant, but distinct desire to join my being with the prairie, to rest inside it. 

So I sat down in the middle of the narrow trail. I placed my hands on the hard, cracked soil. I ignored all my training to use this moment: to compose a poem, to compose my body in space, to compose the memory I would take away from “the experience.” 

I went to earth. I sank my hands in the soil. I grounded. There’s a reason we have all of these cliches. 

Skin-time, my aunt calls this, when she’s talking about a baby and their parent. A deeply restful, deeply needful, deeply vulnerable state. 

I rested a long time on that prairie soil. I know it was rest because it had no agenda, and I wasn’t trying to bang one together in a hurry. I felt present, and I felt that as enough.

I know it wasn’t enough rest, though, because getting back up was bleak. A pure act of obeying the training that both serves and stifles me. I had to do it, in the sense that I could not sit on that hillside long enough to effect some kind of recovery, without also encountering the need to eat, find shelter, go back to the money factory so I can pay my rent.

Every so often, we know we need to “take the day off.” We have learned to talk about “disconnecting for the weekend,” and taking the occasional “mental health day.” I’d like to suggest that the day, and even the weekend, is the incorrect unit of measurement to talk about any serious undertaking. 

Like, for example, rest. Like recovery. You can’t grate yourself year after year against personal, national, and planet-level crises — climatic, political, medical, economic — and then “take the day off” and expect to emerge anything like rested. 

This is the message my own art is unsubtly offering right now. My body is offering it too — can we say that the body and the art are separate? — because my intellect has been offering it for years, and I’ve been responding with “yes, you’re right!” and a thoughtful shift or two, and also without actually resting. 

Actually resting would involve… I don’t even know how to answer that invitation. I can just touch the edges of some answers, and they’re radical in ways I’m not ready to fully look upon, let alone embrace. They open up a yawning gulf directly in front of my exhausted feet.

Possibly what I’m lacking is courage to look straight at them. They’re big, and unmapped. But to paraphrase Christina Tran, if I so much as glance at them sideways, I see them staring back at me, straight on. They know: if you want to change your life, you have to change your life.

Ok. So that’s out there. This is a long-term undertaking, and I’m gathering the courage to look into its eyes and befriend it. Meantime, is there any hope for some rest in the day to day? 

This is where I can think usefully in a direction that might be more broadly helpful. What is rest, if it’s more than just “taking the day off?” What does it feel like? Until I can recognize it, I can’t invite more of it into my life, and disinvite more of what actively works against it.

From my own experience, I want to offer two characteristics of rest that are helping me sort out these questions, slowly.

Rest is about focus.

A partial list of things that aren’t restful: going for a walk while also answering email; checking my various text and chat apps on mobile while also working from my laptop; having multiple tabs open in my browser. 

I’m not saying these things are necessarily bad, I’m saying they’re asking my brain to task-switch continually, which prohibits focus. 

Rest is about focus, about presence. Rest is being able to hear myself think. It’s having the mental and temporal space to follow a thought or idea for as long as I want to, and to put that idea down and pick it back up again, usefully, at some leisure. 

It’s not necessarily not-working — the activity itself is perhaps less important to restfulness than how I go about it. Ursula LeGuin puts it like this: “How you play is what you win.”

I can “take a day off” from multi-tasking, or from the internet (which encourages multi-tasking), but the kind of rest I need is the sort that accumulates from living a life that encourages focus most of the time. 

Every so often, I might take a day or an hour off from that focused being. Maybe there is some really urgent shit going down, and I also need to take a walk. So this time, the mobile comes along. This is fine. 

But this is not how I live. I live in what I’ve previously called The Scatter. I dislike it, and I try to build in as many breaks from it as possible. 

This is the wrong direction of effort: pushing against what rubs me wrong, instead of aligning with what flows cleanly. Or I might imagine it as hauling a very large rock uphill, all the time.

No wonder my results are less than satisfying. Less than restful. 

Rest is anti-consumption and anti-accomplishment.

A way I imagine that I am resting is to read books. The grammar of that sentence shows part of the problem: books. Reading a book — with focus, at leisure — is restful. Reading books — consuming them, perhaps recording their consumption, always thinking about the next one — is not.

Relatedly, I imagine it is restful to sit down with a glass of wine or a plate of snacks, or in front of the TV. Sometimes it is. But half the time, I’ve rushed whatever I was doing before, so I could get to the part of the day where I’m “allowed” to consume alcohol or watch TV. Now that I’m here, I’m not sure what alcohol I want, or what film I want, or if alcohol or a film really is what I want, and I don’t have time to figure any of that out because I’m so damn tired; I need to rest before it’s time to do something else. 

Rest here has become another item on the to-do list, and consumption has become a shorthand way to check that item off. It’s a false flag, brought to us by an economy and social order that encourages us to think of ourselves primarily as consumers. To rest, I need to stop falling for it. 

I also like to assume I am resting as long as I am doing one thing at a time. But mostly that one thing is checking something off the to-do list. Answering my emails: one thing. Applying for a residency: one thing. Proofreading the typeset manuscipt of my forthcoming book: one thing. But none of these things are restful. They’re too focused on getting something done.

And they’re too focused on a schedule: getting something done within X minutes, hours, or days. An activity is most restful when it takes the time it takes.

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Recently, my family started setting aside an evening a week to build a fire, pour adult beverages, and take turns reading three different translations of Beowulf out loud. This may or may not be your personal idea of a great evening, but here’s something it objectively is: high-quality rest. 

It’s focused. Nobody checks their texts; nobody cooks dinner while also trying to listen. We are not trying to fill time until the next appointment in front of a screen somewhere. 

It’s anti-consumption. We got the books through our library holds system. (Which took the time it took.) Alcoholic beverages (ok, yes, we picked mead) are an adjunct pleasure, not a goal.

And it’s anti-accomplishment. The object isn’t to write an essay comparing the translations, or do a podcast about them, or even to finish. It’s literally just for fun. 

Using this activity as a model is starting to teach me how to think about rest more regularly, what to look for when I go searching for it.

You know what else is restful? Creative practice. But only if what you’re doing is basically play. 

Making art is focus-work, and it’s the opposite of consumption. But for most of us, it’s also goal-based, and for some of us, it brings questions of consumption (are you making a book, for example?) into the spotlight on the other side of the stage. 

We love doing it, though. It can be hard to separate our work from our play, and maybe for some of us, the dream has been that we should not need to.

I’d like to argue that we do. Especially right now. As epidemiologists keep reminding us, the pandemic isn’t over just because folks are getting vaccinated. And as mental health experts keep reminding us, the social and emotional trauma is likely to be years in the unfolding. 

So we need rest — we always have, but now we need it like we need to take Tylenol and lie down when our head is splitting. We need to figure out what rest is for us, and how to live it much, much more often than most of us do. 

A friend was telling me yesterday about the question she’s learning to ask herself, to manage some pretty intense external circumstances: what do I need right now? As in: this moment, not existentially. She answers this in various ways: a nap; a glass of water; to call a friend instead of texting; to spend the day researching, looking forward to some undemanding tv tonight.

I like this question for so many reasons. It’s easy, at least in the asking. It forces a person to take their own self seriously. It opens the door to healing right now. It’s kind and humane, and also it takes no shit. I’m starting to ask it too, and so much of the time, my answer is something focused, something fully-present, something that’s not about consuming or accomplishing. 

This, I think, is why even my poetry — sometimes a restful activity, and sometimes not, depending on how I’m pursuing or inviting it — is sending me regular reminders about the pre-eminent importance of shifting my life into a restful gear. 

My word for the year is Listen. I am trying.

Maybe my word — for the season? — is actually Rest. 

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*The reference my brain is going for here is from the Book of Mark, 6:31: “Come away by yourselves to a desert place and rest awhile.” Desert here means deserted, not necessarily dry or cactusy.