Posts Tagged ‘how to rest’

Lessons From Doves

Posted: April 24, 2020 in god, recovery
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Yesterday I sat outside my house on the side patio. After a while I noticed that two mourning doves had landed in the corner of my yard on the wall surrounding my small decorative pond and fountain. They arrived as if from nature’s chef, an amuse-bouche, free, surprising, desirable. The tiny pond is a cool oasis full of water lilies, duck weed and water Hawthorne and around the edges grow nasturtiums and coreopsis and alyssum. It’s a lovely cool spot covered with a trellis full of passion vines.

One of the doves wandered over to the rocks around the pond to drink and began to splash around. Then leaving the pond, it walked along the bricks at the top of the stucco wall in front of it and sat down beside its mate in the shade of an orange blooming cape honeysuckle. It was a warm day here in San Diego, high 70’s, but there in the shade the doves sat side-by-side and settled into a mid-day repose, a luxuriating sloth, a robust calm, ataraxia, robust tranquility. Their legs disappeared. They sank into the cool bricks and widened. They so settled that when I moved my chair out of the sun, only 25 feet away, they didn’t move a feather to fly.

During the coronavirus pandemic, as we social isolate, for many of us there’s less to do than we are used to. In such a limiting milieu as this, I find myself flitting between uncomfortable feelings. What is it? Boredom? Lethargy? Anxiety? Malnoia, that vague feeling of mental discomfort. Unlike the doves, I don’t settle well in the shade.

Caralyn Collar, a blogger I follow at beautybeyondbones puts it well in saying, “we’re grappling with … restlessness.”

Yup! Nailed it! Caralyn is restless. I’m restless. The world is restless. Our children are restless. My cat is restless. Early the other morning while it was still dark, I stepped out to look at the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter through my telescope. Unbeknownst to me the cat came out with me, at 5 AM! When I went back in, she was locked out.. When we got up we were like, “Where is the cat?” We found her huddled under a bush in the side yard. She was glad to come back in. She was lucky one of the local coyotes that roam our master-planned community didn’t eat her.

We all want to escape, run out the door, get out again. We want to get out to malls, coffee shops, stores, restaurants, breweries, the gym, parks, the beach, church, friend’s homes, work, parties, hangouts — and get food — anything but grocery store food — and hugs.

The restless don’t rest that well. I confess I’m addicted to movement. We all are. We are addicted to motion, ambulation, talking, meeting, driving, projects, errands, shopping! We’ve had a lifetime of consumerism. Sure we can still buy online but buying things on Amazon is getting old! I want to touch stuff! I want to hobnob with the checker.

What to do?

Sitting the other day watching the two doves in the shade under the honeysuckle on the cool bricks, I found myself admiring their equanimity, their composure, their even disposition, their ability to just be there, to rest.

The dove is a symbol of the Holy Spirit of God. I think we like the Holy Spirit just like we like our consumer culture. We like the Holy Spirit to be in motion, to come to us frenetic, with brio, with verve, with spunk, with clangorous tongues of fire, agentic, shedding gifts, flying lead bird to the next wonder-venture. And while all that is fine and good, my resting doves, by the pond, reminded me that the Holy Spirit is also a Spirit of comfort and of rest, and that our God is a spirit of rest, and invites us to enter his rest.

The doves came and sat with me. Sometimes God comes that way, just to sit with us, in silence, to sit with us in our uncomfortable feelings, to sit with us in our anxiety and to sit with us in our restlessness. He knows we are restless, and he knows the true rest is found in him, in sitting with him, in silence. Seeing that he isn’t all on edge to jump up and fly and fidget and fume and fix, seeing that he knows how to sink his legs and feathers into the everyday-shady-brick-mundane gives us permission to be content, at times, with doing nothing. God our quiet feathered flâneur.

I think I could take lessons from my neighborhood doves! To rest some of the day away with no shame attached — that’s progress. That’s progress in moving away from addictive motion and persistent restlessness. They’ll be time again for all that; perhaps this is the time to get better at resting.

This evening as I take my walk I hear a dove cooing gently, roosted, retired, settled for the night, signaling its intrinsic restful contentment.

Deep Rest

Posted: November 22, 2015 in beautiful, goodness
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Every day we need rest, sometimes we need deep rest.

We need a kind of deep, abyssopelagic, bottom dwelling rest when we have become cumulatively tired, when we have pushed for too long, too hard, too fast.

So how do we get that; how do we rest in such a way that we shape within ourselves a rubust recovery?

To do this we must detach, detrailer and deplane We must unhook, unsnap and unfasten. We must quit.

We must quit work, we must quit doing any work and we must quit planning more work in the car while driving home.

We must quit communicating. Yes, we must stop talking with others for a time, so that we can listen to ourselves and God. We must stop  making phone calls, texting, emailing and connecting on social media.

Why? Because deep healing is a solitary thing; it is hermetic, reflective, a kind of mental chewing of the cud, a kind of quiet licking of wounds, a kind of contemplative, ruminative self-mending — in silence.

Silence is salutary. Long silence is curative. Deep silence raises the dead.

To go deep, and recover, to be raised again, we must also do some psychological quitting. We must quit thinking anxiously about our problems, about other people’s problems and about the problem of problems.  We must take  responsibility for being present-in-the-moment of the adequate now, for once, and we would do well, for a few moments at least, to stop acting like we run the world.

This must get so very specific, this kind of honest, congruent, salvific resting. This means taking breaks from things we do habitually.

For instance, we must stop running to the store for the next new thing, the next trendy trinket, fancy food stuff or busy buy fix. We must stop shopping online for our next piece of clothing, the next piece of jewlry, the next nick-nap, knock-knob. We must stop acting as if consuming is the essence of living, stop believing the fallacy that we will be satisfied by the very next bright and colorful fetish we acquire.

Here is the deal, the thing we so often miss. It is not all up to us. So much comes to us, is provided, is taken care of already, at the right time, running together, running over the edge of the cup.

What should we do?

Bask, sun, luxuriate in time, soak, receive.

And most specifcally, to make it clear.

Take naps — like our cats.

Read stuff — slowly.

Eat healthy, yum food.

Look at the bright sky — or at sparkling water.

Listen:

to music,

to the beating of our hearts,

to our own breathing,

to the love stiring inside of us,

to hope,

to peacefulness,

and to God.

Deep Rest

Posted: December 24, 2013 in recovery
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Work, work, work; push, push, push, rush, rush, rush —  that’s just what we middle-class Americans tend to do.

And after extended bouts of work, it’s hard to come down, even when we get a holiday break. I’ve been jittery lately — too many dead lines, shopping trips, meetings, duties and self-imposed, others-imposed, high flying, hard-driving expectations.

Yesterday, after weeks of working too hard, I went and sat in my backyard, with tea, and looked, at my pond, the sky, my plants, at nothing. I also took a nap, and wrote a new batch of proverbs that flowed out of my reflections.

I needed this kind of seeing and doing little, or nothing.

We all need deep rest. What is deep rest? It’s like deep sleep.

Deep sleep, also called slow sleep or wave sleep, alternates with REM (rapid eye movement) sleep in a regular pattern of 3–5 cycles each night.

During deep, body-calming sleep, good stuff happens — the body repairs and regenerates tissues, builds bone and muscle, appears to strengthen the immune system, consolidate new memories and secrete growth hormones.

We need deep sleep. We also need deep rest — rest while we are awake. Deep rest is found in wakeful but quiet, comfortable body postures, in cessation of activity, in relaxed observation of the environment, in quiet reflection, in quiet conversation, in rumination, in meditation and perhaps for some of us in reading, writing or prayer. 

Yesterday I read in the Psalms, took a few minutes to let those wise words soak in and felt appreciative. Later, I went out to the front yard and gardened, and then, slowing time with my hands at my sides. I stood back and looked over my work. I laid-back on time, and with a deep-drawling, pause-pleasing, slow-slipping, soft-shoeing satisfaction, I rested.

Cats sleep 16 hours a day, or five years out of seven. We might do well to emulate our cats more, to cat nap, to cat rest, to cat-live, to slow-blink life softly down. After all, the domestic cats lead the good life.

To deep rest is to slow life down, not to stop life. It means to cook slower, eat slower, talk slower, think slower, react slower. It means to pick a slower wave, found in each life-washed moment, and to ride it gently and patiently all the way to time’s softly-lapping shore.

Rest — deep rest — it’s regenerative;  it’s good.