A Quest For Rest

I’m not talking about flopping on the couch for an evening of Netflix, nor about treating yourself to a mani-pedi or a rose-gold facial. Rather, I’m talking about something that barely exists in our society: community rest. 

Our land co-operative, CoHo Landing, had a chance to experience this unusual notion during the depths of winter this past year. Liticia, another co-op member, and I decided to create a day of rest for all 28 co-op residents—a full, facilitated day with three delicious, nutritious meals and a varied program of relaxation and pleasure to keep us happily doing nothing from morning till bedtime. 

At first, we informally called the event Spa Day. This was meant ironically. Our D.I.Y., anti-capitalist, reduce-reuse-recycle vibe is notably un-spa-like. We wanted to discover an egalitarian, grassroots approach to rest, in deliberate opposition to market constructions of relaxation as a pricey consumer product.

So we settled on the name Exhale Day. A day like a sigh, like letting our shoulders drop and our foreheads soften. A day to feel free.

But to exhale, you first have to inhale. It doesn’t happen on its own. And there in lies a paradox: creating a day of rest took a lot of work.

Liticia and I put in several dozen hours each, and others pitched in to make all the components happen. I was tired afterwards. “Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose?” my husband asked me. “No, not at all,” I answered, perhaps a bit defensively. But he got me thinking. Was there no way to escape the tyranny of work? 

We’d decorated the common house entrance with hanging sari cloth, fresh flowers, and a hidden speaker playing bird song so when people arrived for a breakfast of smoothies and carrot-cake oatmeal, they were already well along the path to mellow. 

All day, people could be seen emerging from the massage room with dreamy eyes and soft faces. We kept the sauna woodstove burning continuously, enhanced with essential oils for healing steam. Outside the sauna was a fire pit and herbal tea for hanging out between sweat sessions. The footbath—a walk-through series of tubs of alternating hot and cold water lined with beach pebbles—elicited gasps and sighs. 

At the reading table, people picked up books of art, poetry, and philosophy and settled into armchairs to enjoy. Others wandered over to the art table and created a collective painting. Another group piled into a van and drove to the lake for a plunge into its cold, pristine water. There was a music jam at the picnic table and a gentle yoga class, and in mid-afternoon, we curled up to watch the classic movie Spirited Away (appropriately, about a bath house for the gods). After dinner we put on music and danced in the candlelight. 

It was as we’d hoped: people revelling in rest. “I had a nap,” said a typically hardworking CoHo member, ambling back into the common house after being absent all afternoon.

“A three-hour nap! I haven’t done that in decades. I didn’t think I could! I feel incredible.” 

At our follow-up debrief, the comment we heard most was: “The best thing was being with each other in this different way. I had so many great conversations.” 

So can shared rest transform social relationships? Is it perhaps an essential ingredient for building community?  Tricia Hersey would say yes. In her book, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, Hersey dissects the ways capitalism, consumerism, imperialism, patriarchy, racism, and all the other ruling -isms have wielded work as a cudgel to control our lives and colonize our minds. 

Rediscovering and elevating rest, not as individualized “self-care” but as a shared activity, is a powerful antidote to such oppressive forces, Hersey says. 

“We need to go back to the ancient and vintage ways of relating to people …

Not only was Exhale Day deeply pleasurable, it also showed us new ways to rest.  

Is rest still resistance when it doubles the length of your to-do list? My answer to this question, after several months of mulling, is yes.

The next Exhale Day will be easier to organize now that we’ve done it once, and eventually Liticia and I can pass the torch to new organizers so she and I can kick back. This will help keep work and rest balanced.

Because balance, ultimately, is the ideal. After all, work is not bad—it gets things done. In an ideal world, work would be something we choose to do because we see its value, not because the economy, the dominant ideology, and our own internalized judgment compel us.

As Hersey writes, “You were not just born to centre your entire existence on work…You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space, to dream, and to connect.”

After breathing in many collective deep breaths, our community achieved some of that on Exhale Day.

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See 'A Quest For Rest' in The Adventure Volume.