Today gets to be about the kind of rest a body needs after an intense weekend in sacred flows with extended family, after an intense week of deepening discernment about my affiliation in a community I love. I don't remember who first taught me that there are different kinds of rest, different kinds of idleness. One kind is when you collapse into your home-space, exhausted and quickly fall asleep. There's another kind that can only happen after your body has recovered from such exhaustion. It's an active-rest, a curious generative doing-nothing while taking in all around you. And of course, many kinds in between.
Laura Sumner Truax and Amalya Campbell suggest this "many kinds of rest" wisdom, even as their words made me smile in disagreement too: "While there are many different kinds of rest and types of idleness, the type of break that means the most is when we stop and experience awe." (Love Let Go: Radical Generosity for the Real World). You can find them with a quick Google-search (which is how I did), and it is a blessing to consider awe, to feel invited to stop, notice, wonder...
...as long as you also remember that awe can also be exhausting, even as it is sacred and touches deep yearnings. Today I return to Cleveland, Ohio...first on pilgrimage to the Hildegard Haus east of the city, then into the museum district for some city-meandering with my dear Brian for our post-Easter respite and recovery days we often try to take after the Lenten/Easter Week journey. "Hi!" I often say to him today. "My name is Lisa." He now smiles and laughs, saying in return, "Hi! I'm Brian." It's our ritual acknowledgement that these holy seasons, days, often mean we don't connect with one another as deeply as in non-Lent/Easter days.
Return is the relevant foreshadowing term, as Holy Saturday took me and my folks up to Cleveland for a 'Hail Mary,' quick-turnaround visit with my Uncle Karl, his family. He was fading fast, and everything converged for us to be able to say good-bye to him before he died at 11:20 a.m., Easter morn. We stopped long enough to STOP, listen, wonder. We are all in awe about what graces were made ours as we traveled together. And we are exhausted, in a good kind of sacred weariness, deep in gratitude.
REST. May you find the rest you desire, you need. Myself, I am off to sit by a Great Lake and to a Hildegard shrine in Ohio, of all places. Who knew?