Permission to Rest
these winter months are cold, and you are still a mammal
Dear friends, for some reason, an older version of this post was sent out this morning. I have restored the final version and am resending it. Sorry to show up in your inbox twice today!
Every time, on these (mildly) cold January days, that I have a moment of free time, I want to sit down and write to you all. Writing is so much of how I understand my experiences, how I come to see the Lord’s movement in my life.
But recently, it feels like the words won’t come. Like they’re frosty, frozen in the snow we won’t get this year. Our average winter temperatures here on the Gulf Coast are anywhere from the low-40s to the mid-70s, and while that doesn’t qualify as cold to anyone who knows the true frigidity of a blizzard, it is certainly cooder than our hot, hot summers. Coupled with the lengthening-but-still-short days, and my apparent inability to keep up with my 26-pound nine-month-old’s calorie needs, my little mammal body is still pushing me to rest. To save my energy. To do what is necessary, and not much more. Sometimes (*gasp*) even less.
I’ve been spending more time reading seasonally-inspired writing lately. I’m learning to pay attention to the signs and signals of my body—“Listen to your body,” I tell my two-year-old all the time, when she clearly needs to pee, or nap, or eat, but do I do the same myself? Why do I continue to choose to push myself, as if one more thing would allow me to prove my worth, to earn my keep, to justify my presence here.
I’m learning to give myself permission to rest.
I have been doing so for years—my husband’s ability to revel in authentic rest was one of the things that first drew me to him—but this practice of checking in with my body has been a game changer. There is something objective about noticing physical signs that gives more validity and urgency to the desires and needs that have always been present.
It’s hard to call dehydration “laziness”. It’s hard to call sleep-deprivation “laziness”. And, frankly, as I’ve become more aware of the effects of seasonal weather and light patterns on mammal bodies, it’s harder to call quasi-hibernation “laziness”.
It’s not that I don’t think laziness or acedia or apathy are real things. Certainly, they are. But you wouldn’t (shouldn’t) call a woman lazy who, nine months pregnant, took the elevator instead of the stairs.
We ask so much of ourselves in this lifestyle that is, in many ways, so unsuited to our bodies. We were not made for desk jobs, for computer screens and phone calls and artificial intelligence. We were made for movement, for communal living, for hunting and foraging and tasting and smelling and seeing and hearing and worshipping.
For everything there is a time and a season: a season for pushing yourself, and a season for resting. A season for fasting, and a season for eating more than you think you need so you can keep up with your kids. A season for waking up early to pray, and a season of praying during middle-of-the-night wakeups.
I take great comfort in the fact that the Catholic Church excuses pregnant and breastfeeding women from the requirements to fast and abstain from meat.1 The Church, in Her wisdom, is telling us that our bodies are doing so much already. We are living out our sanctification in a visceral way already. It’s not that we don’t need help, or that we don’t need reminders. But it probably wouldn’t be prudent for us to deny ourselves in this way.
There are other fasts we can make, things that aren’t related to our basic bodily needs for food and water and rest. Things that aren’t covers for our desperate attempt to control our lives, to earn our own salvation.
But I digress.
Friend, I know that the dishes are piling up. The toys are scattered on the floor. I know that the laundry needs to be done. And the shopping. And the sweeping and scrubbing and donating.
But you are an embodied soul. Your body matters. “Every body is a gift.” Yes, even yours. Even now. Listen to what your body is asking for—keeping in mind your fallen nature, certainly, but also holding space for the needs that, being filled, will allow you to pursue your vocation with more grace and virtue and joy.
For whatever it may or may not be worth, you have my permission to rest for a moment before getting back to the grindstone.
In the meantime, I’d love to share a few things I’ve read and enjoyed lately.2 If reading is restful and nourishing and life-giving, I’d love to add these items to your list. If reading is overwhelming and stressful and one more thing to do, then consider this reflection ended.
Have you been feeling the tug of winter this year? How can you give yourself permission to meet your body’s needs this week?
Blessed are You on the Struggle Bus by
:But the literal beatitudes say, Nope. We are blessed even in—maybe especially in—those circumstances our culture calls “cursed.”
Since then, I’ve started writing little beatitudes in my head. When some minor shitstorm befalls me, I write an absurdly specific beatitude. Here are a few recent ones:
Blessed are you whose oven breaks a day before your husband gets Covid.
Blessed are you whose hand is stung in the night by European paper wasps, because they’ve infested your broken air conditioning unit, which is built into the wall and you’re not sure how to remove it.
Blessed are you whose mammogram tech gaslit you about the crappy experience you had last time. “We would never do that,” she said. Blessed are you and your mammary glands.
babies, bathtubs, and Emmanuel by the one and only
, who never ceases to amaze me:I’m the baby in the bathtub. I’m the squalling, terrified, avoidant and ambivalent child, who had one bad experience and would rather never take a bath again. Sure, if you make me I’ll get through it — kicking and screaming and throwing a fit. We’ll all be a mess when we’re through. You can make me do it, but it won’t be pretty.
Like the Creatures of Winter Do by the lovely
:It’s January and my brain feels buzzy and scattered. I thought quitting caffeine would help with that. I’m opening the windows a few minutes every morning because someone on the internet said fresh air in a home helps with brain fog. I’m trying to be brave and get outside even when it's the last thing I want to do. It’s helping. Barely.
To be in your body is to pay attention to those signals so that you can respond and adjust, and in a time when our minds can so easily spiral, so easily find themselves in a loop, that simple act of reconnecting feels more important than ever. “When we get outside and are physically present, standing on the ground and looking at the horizon with naked eyes, or digging in the dirt, or sitting on the grass, we get into our body, which helps the chaos in our brain slow down,” says Sutton.
This, to the best of my knowledge, includes the weekly Friday abstinence and the fasts on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. It does not include the one-hour fast before Communion.
These authors don’t know I’m sharing their posts here, and many are folks I’ve never interacted with before; I was simply struck by their thoughts and am excited to pass along some good words to mull over in these still-dark days.
I was raised by parents who were ALWAYS doing something, especially my dad. It's not a bad thing to be productive, for sure, but even "useful" work can become dangerous to us in excess.
Busy-ness can be a sly tactic of the devil. We fall into a trap thinking that we have to work and provide some sort of good to have value when in reality, we have value because we were made good!
Yes, rest is so necessary. I’ve found getting back into a rhythm here has been a struggle and it’s because rest has taken precedence over other priorities (connection, being online, writing even 😅) Love these thoughts Sara!