Receiving Rest

 

Self care is a critical part of your artistic process. Give yourself the gift of rest.

I have been working on receiving this season, finding beauty in the icicles outside my window, the flurries that whip around the yard, the luscious quiet of nighttime snowfall. In short: receiving rest. Receiving what is being offered - ease - instead of demanding a book to show for all my time inside. 

I want to talk about what it means to receive rest, and to receive a place, a moment, a season of your life. As Natalie Goldberg says, "Practice comes from our body - we receive it." 

What does it mean to receive our writing practice in our bodies?

Sometimes it takes a long time for the seeds of a story to bloom. Sometimes, it just needs good ground to burrow in, and trust from the earth of your body that, when the time is right, the words will flower onto the page. 

Trusting that the words will come is hard. Preparing the way is even harder. What does it look like to be actively fallow? To celebrate seasons of rest, periods of preparation? 

Some of my resting places are:

  • the moon

  • windchimes on my back and front porches

  • lighthouses

  • my husband's eyes

  • my morning cup of coffee

  • the Sahara desert

  • my grandmother's lap

  • Minnesota

  • Bowie’s Starman

  • my childhood bunk bed

  • The Boston Public Library

  • the lake by my old place in North Carolina

  • Little Women

  • Anne of Green Gables

  • my best friend's smile

  • my sister's laugh

  • my kitty's soft body

  • a dark theater just before the curtain rises

  • a blank piece of paper

  • Mary Oliver

  • Sunsets

  • Sunrises

  • My breath

What are your resting places?

I've been thinking a lot these days about how my writing can become more of a resting place for me. It's so often fraught - for all of us - with the weight of expectation, the inner critic, always feeling like we've fallen short, or behind. 

We crave and grasp and want, so very badly, to flow, to write the book, to finish the book, to get the deal. But after that mountain? More mountains. How do we rest during the climb, on the summit, on the way down, and in the valleys between?

What would it look like to receive rest, to give ourselves permission to reject the pressures of the attention economy: to set the phone down, to not do it all, to take good care of our bones?

How do we, as people with wonderfully gifted imaginations, imagine our way into some rest? Some delight? Some time to jot down a few words?

One way is to see your words in the context of a gift economy, as a gift that is being offered you, and an opportunity for you to pay that gift forward. To see yourself and your words as an essential part of a larger ecological system that needs you to keep telling stories and writing poems and journal entries - not just to-do lists. A gift that you don't have to stand in line for, wrap, mail, or cross off a list.

This gift is already inside you, waiting patiently under the tree of your heart, wrapped and ready to be opened. 

A piece of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass sums up the questions surrounding giving and receiving rest to ourselves, including the gift of our words and our words as resting places:

“A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward, you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present.”

In 2022 I'm going to be resting more, and writing more, and giving more time to study.

If you feel that same tug, a whispered inner yes, then sit with that. Listen to it. Build the writing life you long for in 2022.

Heather Demetrios

Written By: Heather Demetrios

Heather Demetrios is a critically acclaimed author, writing coach, and certified meditation teacher based in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

She has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a recipient of the PEN America Susan P. Bloom Discovery Award for her debut novel, Something Real. Her novels include Little Universes, I’ll Meet You There, Bad Romance, as well as the Dark Caravan fantasy series: Exquisite Captive, Blood Passage, and Freedom’s Slave. Her non-fiction includes the Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection Code Name Badass: The True Story of Virginia Hall, and she is the editor of Dear Heartbreak: YA Authors and Teens on the Dark Side of Love.

She will be teaching our upcoming Craft Boost: Bingeable Chapters in April, 2022.

 
Shari Becker