Rest can look wild
Zac Jones-Gómez reflects on what rest means, from learning to grow to tilling rot, in the last newsletter of Rest season... We all need some 'messy rest'.
Like many freelancers, the concept of “rest” is a hard one for me to grasp when I wear so many hats at once. And like many freelancers, I have a steady gig to enable my writing addiction. It’s fair to say that I’m always thinking about food since my 9-5 is at an urban farming and food justice nonprofit in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.
I don’t have a farming background, so I’ve learned a lot about how to coax something edible out of the soil. In time, I’ve also learned that the cliché “gardening teaches you about life” is frustratingly true. One of the most impactful lessons that the farm has taught me is about rest.
Rest can look wild. Fields in the winter are overgrown with unharvested covercrops and untended weeds. Stalks from last season’s okra and vines from the tomatoes lay rotting in the aisles. This aspect of rest is messy and dirty and unsightly. Donors don’t want to see it, and neighbors certainly don’t want to see it. In fact, that winter resting state has been cited as a reason to deny us land in a neighborhood, for fear of ruining the view with what people see as waste.
But that rest is transformative. Because come springtime, we till that rot and those weeds and the covercrops into the soil and infuse it with fresh nutrients. That rest period is the launching pad for a season’s worth of growth. The vegetables grown on land that has had time to rest are bigger and more nutritious, and feed more people when shared with our neighbors who live in food apartheid.
We’re in that launching pad stage now, and it’s so exciting as the fields get tilled and the first kale gets planted. But we wouldn’t be here without rest, as messy as it can be.
I think about what “messy rest” looks like in my life. Those days when the dishes pile up, and then the laundry, and then the books as I start one and then move on to another before finishing the first. Those days when you just let yourself exist, dammit. It can be easy to feel really guilty about doing that when there are so many things I could be doing or should be doing.
But that messy rest is a launching pad for me to gather my energy, so I can throw myself forward into my next project with my whole and full self. That overwinter period that you let yourself go through gives you the nutrients to sustain yourself and avoid burnout. So embrace the mess!
I thank Anna and Chloe for choosing Rest this season, which lined up perfectly with the rest period at my job. I think we all used this time to charge up and let ourselves exist as we reflect on what we do, why we do it, and how to improve it. And now we’re ready for some exciting things ahead!
Before we get to the new stuff coming soon, I want to leave you with some of the Sourced pieces I’ve been reflecting on:
An emerging rice renaissance in India
Argentine wheat hides a history of native genocide
Baking with cinnamon, things to consider (because I still crave baked goods with cinnamon, even as the weather warms!)
As always, please do share any work you have enjoyed on Sourced, the more we’re read the more the project will be able to grow:
Zac works behind the scenes at Sourced scheduling social media and seeking out stories for our Queer Pathways series. You can find more of his writing on his blog The Kitchen Gent.
As a freelance writer coming out of my own messy rest period -- imposed upon me by not listening to my body's signs to slow down -- I so resonate with and appreciate this! Thank you for sharing.