Transcript: TRICIA HERSEY on Deprogramming from Grind Culture /318
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young, today we are speaking with Tricia Hersey.
Tricia Hersey What I do is I lean on the past, I lean on my ancestors like I talk about that in the book so much. I lean on the ideas of what they were doing and how they were able to be in the system, but not of it, how they were able to still find joy and pleasure, and have family, and still come up with inventive plans to escape.
Ayana Young Tricia Hersey is a Chicago native with over 20 years of experience as a multidisciplinary artist, writer, theologian and community organizer. She is the founder of The Nap Ministry, an organization that examines rest as a form of resistance and reparations by curating spaces for the community to rest via community rest activations, immersive workshops, performance art installations, and social media. Her research interests include Black liberation theology, womanism, somatics, and cultural trauma. She is the author of the upcoming book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto which will be published in October 11, 2022. You can learn more about her work and pre-order the book at thenapministry.com
Oh my goodness, Tricia, I am so darn excited and happy to have you back on For The Wild Podcast. It has been a good while and I just already feel so enlivened by our pre conversation.
Tricia Hersey I cannot wait, I've been waiting for this and thinking about it for a while. I'm so looking forward to getting into some deep conversation with you. Thanks for having me.
Ayana Young We were kind of just in a really good riff about where we're at in the world, what's happened since the pandemic, and it's interesting because our first interview was originally released in June 2020, and holy moly, the world has witnessed a deluge of resignations and general burnouts within jobs, within life, and yet, it does not seem that we have come close to reckoning with this reality. And instead of actually taking a break, many people have been forced into new forms of exhaustion and exploitation, as the companies that continue to exploit just have gotten richer and richer, kind of unbelievably richer. So your new book comes really at a vital time for us here, because I do still think that we can turn the tides. So I'd love to just, you know, start with hearing a bit about your book. What motivated you to write this right now and what you hope the world might gain from it?
Tricia Hersey Yeah, that's such a good question. It's a deep question, because I've been thinking about that. I thought about that from the moment I knew that I would be writing a book. I knew I didn't want it to be–maybe I can talk about what it isn’t and I didn't want it to be some quick fix, tip, advice guide that you pick up and think you're going to be done. I knew I wanted it to be a manifesto, because I love manifestos. I love the history of a manifesto. I've studied them since I was younger. I love history and archives and I really knew that I wanted this piece, this book to really be an attempt to bring a new reality into existence and I wanted it to challenge and provoke, I wanted the form to feel like an incantation over people's heads, over their bodies as they read it. I wanted it to be a field guide and a collaborator on this lifelong pilgrimage we're going to be on to be able to start unraveling ourselves from the grips of grind culture and white supremacy. It had to be something that asks the question, what do you believe? What can you imagine? What can be? Like so I knew I wanted it to form to be something that felt like me, you know, felt like my background as the daughter of a Black preacher, a Black Pentecostal militant preacher. One as someone who has studied homiletics you know, the science of creating a sermon and who's a poet, so there is poetry in there. It's full of stories about my family, and it has a little bit of a memoir. It's really trance work, I will uplift it as trance work because there’s a lot of repetition. I’ve always named the work of the Nap Ministry as being a deprogramming tool, like the reason we exist is to be a tool to begin to help you deprogram from the brainwashing that grind culture has given to us since birth. So I've been naming it as a brainwashing since the beginning of this whole work and so I knew I wanted it to be something that could counteract with that, that could be a counter narrative to the brainwashing that we have been under our entire lives, the brainwashing of social media, I wanted it to feel like something that could begin to work in the underground, work and it come at people from a different way. So I want people to lay down while they're reading it, and to feel that it is something that is demanding the impossible. So any manifesto work really demands the impossible. And I just want this to be like this on the ground field guide, like so while we're all on the ground and are trying to, like dismantle and come against these systems like it can be something that is a support, something, you can stuff in your bag, or have under your pillow, something that you can open up, and it'd be a guide to help you as we all began to like, go in deep around the idea of resting, saving our lives, as resting being a resistance to all the systems that want us working all the time.
Ayana Young That was a really beautiful explanation, I really saw the book and maybe I want to go into the numbness a bit and really explore what rest is and what rest isn't, because I think people are even confused about that. I think actually, this design, this strategic design to keep us weak, and it also wants to keep us unmotivated toward that wholeness, and, you know, you work so hard that you can't take care of yourself, or your community, or the earth. And I guess also, I'm thinking about this word lazy, which I've heard you speak about. Well, I guess I'm interested in how laziness and work are a part of the capitalist design. And within this, how is the rest you offer different from what we're told we earn through capitalism, like sitting and scrolling through Instagram or Netflix? Because there's this, I think there's this idea of, “Oh, you're so exhausted, you're gonna get home and you know, what you're just gonna put on the internet or the TV. And finally, you get to, quote, rest?” But I'm like, is that rest? When you look at our ancestors, they were very strong people, and I am concerned about the way we are offered rest, which I don't actually think is the regenerative rest that you're speaking about.
Tricia Hersey Right. Exactly. Yeah, that's another reason I'm gonna keep going back to the book when you talk about why I wrote the book. One of the main reasons why I wrote the book is so that I could dispel some of the stuff that people were thinking because I would be on IG, you know, social media is this beautiful technology–most people think it is, I don't believe it, they think it is beautiful technology that brings us together and connects us, and while it does have the opportunity to do that, and we've been able to remix it and be inventive around using it to connect with people all over the world. That's not why it was created. It was created simply to keep you scrolling, buying, consuming, and online, distracted. That's really what it was for, it's another extension of capitalism and so I want to take away the idea of what people were consuming online about rests, they would be like “Oh the Nap Ministry, this is about resting, I’m going to lay down” or “This is about resting so that I can be more productive to do more for the system. I can do more at work if I rest today, I’ll do it.” And I was like, so many things because of the way social media is created, it doesn't allow for deep nuanced conversation. And so this book needed to be a part of the literary canon. It needed to be a part of the world so people can have something that they can hold on to, to be able to get the facts, to be able to start to begin to read a sentence and be like, “Oh, my goodness, that's what she meant by that,” you know, I really wanted to help people to deepen and slow down and to really get offline.
So I'm so glad this book is written so that people can put down their phones, and sit and lay down and turn the page and read chapters where I'm like, “This is what rest is, this is what rest isn’t.” And so I'm very particular about that. There's a whole section where I talk about what rest is, and what it isn’t and rest is not what any of us think it is, because remember, we've all been trained and taught under the curriculum of white supremacy and capitalism, grind culture, grind culture has taught us everything that we know about what resting is, about our labor, about what our bodies are, about who we are. And so, because of that, we can't trust it. We can't trust the information. We can't trust a professor of capitalism, that curriculum can no longer be trusted, and we have to totally ignore it, totally dismantle from it, and deprogram from it, to begin to slowly bring ourselves to what's really true, we've been bamboozled most of our lives understanding what it is. So people don't know what rest is, they think productivity is something and it's not, and so to me, resting is anything that slows you down enough so that your mind and body can connect.
So we start thinking about the somatics of our body and our mind, when you think about what it means to be exhausted, to be sleep deprived. When we look at the neurology of what's happening in our brains when we're sleep deprived, we are not moving and thinking and connected in a way that's at the full potential of what our brains can do. Our brains are being, in a lot of ways, traumatized by our sleep deprivation and because of that, our bodies are also deeply traumatized by it. But then also, spiritually, we're disconnected from the divine dwelling place that we have, our bodies are an antenna for the Creator, for divine ideas, for knowledge, our bodies hold so much information for us, they are the teachers. And so when we aren't connected to them, when we aren't slowed down enough to begin to slowly do the connecting process, our brains and body needs to kind of catch up with each other, to support each other, to suit each other and hold each other up, we continue to be zombies and numbed out.
So when I think about resting, I think about anything that can slow you down, it can be, you know, not returning a phone call immediately, listening to music, dancing, walking, you know, crocheting, meditation, I mean, it's infinite. So I could be on this thing for hours, just with a list, it’s infinite, but when we can begin to listen to our bodies, to say, What does my body want? Why, why do I keep ignoring my body, my body wants to rest. My body wants to slow down, my body wants to wander, it wants to linger. And instead I say, “No, you can't have that, I'm going to push through. I'm going to burn the midnight oil, I’ll sleep when I’m dead. That feels lazy if I do that.” So this idea of laziness, I don't use the word laziness. I don't use the word lazy at all. I believe that any person, specifically I want to talk about Black people, Black people use the word lazy so much. And I'm like, you know that that's what you know, our ancestors were hearing while they were on plantations working 20 hours a day. So you don't come from a legacy of laziness. You don't come from a legacy of not working. I mean, you should not be calling yourself lazy because that's simply language that the oppressor has taught you, language of the oppressor. It goes back to our deprogramming and decolonizing from all the lies we've been told.
So this idea of laziness, I think, I wish it could be like, totally eradicated from my vocabulary from my imagination. Like there's no such thing as lazy in a capitalist world, who could be lazy here when the world goes on 24 hours a day, seven days a week pushing output, pushing production, pushing this tool for us to continue to make the Empire richer to make the Empire more wealthy. And so there is no room, there is no one who is lazy in a capitalist system. There is no human body that I believe that is also lazy. And so I reject the word lazy and I want people to begin to place that word in the system that they live in. And so a lot of people don't realize that they're living in a system that doesn't even see them as a human being, you're aligning with a system that merely sees you as nothing but a tool and a machine. And so that grief, the grief of that, of knowing that that's what someone feels about you, the manipulation of knowing that that's what you're being born into it, we can't go on without resting, we're not going to be able to make it without resting, we're not going to be able to make without connecting with our bodies and with the earth and with each other, which simply aren't, it's just like, not possible. And so I feel like I keep hollering from a bullhorn. Like, we're not going to make it if we don't stop it. And sometimes I feel like, can people hear me? Who's hearing me? You know, who's this message touching? Who was it for? Who's available to grab it? Because we're in such a crisis that sometimes it feels like, what can I believe, you know, what can be really sweeping change for us to be able to move past this, and I believe and know that resting will be one of the many tools that we use.
Ayana Young I'm thinking back to one of our unrecorded conversations, and I know that we both have a lot of concern for folks to even get to a place where they can make the decision to say, “Yes, I'm going to commit to this meticulous practice and it's going to be long-term.” Because so many of us have been really wrapped up in the programming, in the duping, and so we're busy and we're burnt out and we're numb and we're not even reading emails, and we're not even focusing anymore, because it's the programming and also the addiction to capitalism has been so reinforced, like you were mentioning earlier in this conversation about how challenging it is for people to even believe that they are worthy, or because I think capitalism has become so quick and witty, and really intelligent on working off our psychology. So we may say, “Oh, we want to break away” and then something says “But, you want to buy this.” And so we go “Okay, well, yeah, yeah we do wanna buy that.” Okay, now we're fulfilled, but you're not. And so capitalism really, really understands our psychology. There's entire theories on Disaster Capitalism, where capitalism will come in when we're at our lowest, like a substance, will take us and really, really enmesh us in our addiction and what we think of is our need to keep within the system, to keep working, to keep grinding. And so you know, I'm going back to this place of like, okay, we're talking to each other when we haven't yet committed for so many reasons to this meticulous love practice. And it's obviously by design why it's hard for us to commit and we could have hours where we're just discussing that, but it brings me to this quote that you wrote and it says “The Earth, the plants, the animals are who we should be collaborating with right now, because humans are not tapped in right now. Trust spirit.”
Tricia Hersey Hmm. Hot off the presses. That's what I'm feeling right now at this moment, like when I say this moment, I mean, like, the season that we are in, you know, it's not thinking about time in a linear way. But it's like, yeah, I feel like we have to tap into spirit and I think a way to do that right now is to connect with the Earth, is to connect with plant medicine, is to connect with animals, and other spirit beings, and the sun, and the sky, and like our breathing like, we are not tapped in, we are so pulled away like capitalism and white supremacy and grind culture, it has us so deeply wrapped up.
I mean I feel like I've noticed it’s worse now that we are in this pandemic, and we’re almost three years in like, I've been tracking this, I've just been watching like, people are more and more, this cognitive dissonance, people feel more numb, they feel very, like exhausted, you can almost read it and feel it on people, like my son is 15 years old and we were talking about it, someone was driving, and they literally just were like driving so crazy and like, almost hit us. And he was like, “I've noticed that people just seem disconnected.” I was like, “Have you noticed that?” He was like, “Yeah, I’ve noticed that since the pandemic.” It feels like people are not here, and I’m understanding what a COVID mind, a COVID body what’s left behind after we're trying to like heal ourselves and stay alive, when there's this thing out here that can make you really sick, or disabled, or kill you, and so I’m like, what has that done to us mentally? What has that done to us spiritually, that another person seems dangerous, you know, the idea of being around another person and them breathing around you at the beginning, it was dangerous, it was a dangerous thing to think of a body, your body is dangerous. It's spreading this and we have to isolate, we're in quarantine, we're away from each other. I think there's been a moment of deep, deep, collective trauma and what that trauma has done to the brain, the studies tell us that trauma absolutely affects the brain. I mean, those have been done for years. And so I'm wondering what a COVID brain is like, what will be left behind, what's left after, what's the residue effects of us attempting to survive a global pandemic of this happening across the board. We're still in the middle of it, you know, the pandemic is not over, people are still getting sick with it. And I'm wondering what is going to look like five years, 10 years, and we began to continue to see like, the mental health crisis that comes up from this and the deepening of our numbing, the deepening of capitalism and how people are truly not tapped. And I always say that to people. Rest is a portal, go there often. Go tap in and you know, tap into your body, tap into spirit, tap into your ancestors, tap into what you can’t, in any way shape or form, tap into when you're in an awake state. Because your awake state is this numbed out, consumed state when you are just watching and seeing and scrolling and just consuming all day and night. But what would it feel like and what could it be when you go into this dream space, where you can go and work things out in this other portal, in this third space and I believe that resting is another dimension and there's a third space, it is a portal for us to go inside of, to invent, to imagine, to simply heal, to have space and so I’m wanting more people to see slowing down and resting as the antidote. You know, always the antidote though, but deeply now, even the antidote to what has happened to these are pandemic bodies or pandemic brains. And we all globally are collectively going through this immense anxiety and trauma and grief. We've lost so many people when you think about the number of people who've died from COVID, it's unimaginable that there are people walking around holding all of that, like “ I've lost my dad, I lost my mom, my sister passed” and they have all of this loss around them and they're still just walking outside putting on a mask, maybe, and then just going, you know just hoping for the best and so I don't know what will become of us and I want rest to continue to be a guidepost. I know for sure that resting can save us and I know for sure that I am trusting on rest, and I'm trusting all my body, over anything, I won't trust any of the systems to in any way care for me and I'm leaning on community care and rest in our own inventive power. The subversive power that I've learned from my ancestors on how to be in a world, but not be of it, you know, we're in this world, but we don't have to be of it, we can find these like small ways to resist and be maroons and be outlaws against it.
Ayana Young Yeah, I really hear the call to trust spirit and to trust our bodies. I think the compounding lies that we have been told, are being told, will be told, is outrageous and it's exhausting in and of itself. Like there's the exhaustion of the work, but then there's the exhaustion of navigating the lies of our culture, not trusting our leaders, not trusting global systems, not trusting that we'll be cared for, like you said, so that is a psychological exhaustion on top of the physical exhaustion. And then when do we have the space within that, to have grace for ourselves, for each other, to take care of ourselves, for our community to actually cook a meal? Like, what are we left with? When we are just, I mean, so it is a violent attack. And I think with the pandemic, it's really, it feels wise, in this moment, to pause and say, you know, what, actually, the last three years have been really challenging psychologically, for us. This anxiety and the stress of the beginning when we didn't know what was happening to the lock downs to this, to the fear. I mean, there was so much, and then all of a sudden, it's like, okay, now airplanes, you don't need to wear a mask. It's like, what, what has happened here, like, I know, and I mean, that in and of itself, where there was so much pressure and anxiety and information and who do you trust and who this and then all of a sudden, it's as if it didn't happen, but it is happening. And this is the same with climate change. It's like there's this big thing and it's gonna get us all in the apocalypse. But you know, what, keep doing what you're doing and go to Mexico? Buy more Amazon, it’s okay, but the world is burning, but keep buying, but it’s like how can we be clear when the messaging from every angle is literally–of course, we're numb. Of course, we're in this place where we're crawling in confusion. I just want to take a moment and have compassion for all of us and be like, yeah, it is so confusing.
Tricia Hersey It is so hard. It is not easy. This is not going to be easy work. This is dark work, like people they come on and see oh the Nap Ministry, that sounds so cute, the Nap Bishop and “Oh this is yellow”, and you know what I’m saying? Like pillows, blankets, and clouds, like this is some real deep dark work. Okay, this is some deep, dark realizations and some underground dystopian nightmare ideas around like, what is really happening to us and what I will say to that is, I lean on the past, I lean on my ancestors, like I talk about that in the book so much. I lean on the ideas of what they were doing and how they were able to be in the system, but not of it. How they were able to still find joy and pleasure, and have family, and still come up with inventive plans to escape, I uplift Harriet Tubman, underground railroad, I uplift people jumping off slave ships and hiding out in caves and maroons of North America, I really uplift the ways in which resistance and refusal was like, there was no I might do it or might not do it, it's like it was freedom or death. It was life or death for them to be able to make these choices and how within those choices, they continue to float on this spaceship of uncertainty that they create. I think about my grandmother leaving the deep part of the South because she saw a lynching, like millions of other people in a great migration, they left and they just floated on these little spaceships of hope that they created with like a $20 in their pocket and a little note on how to get there and they just really trusted spirit and the guidance of spirit I think about Harriett Tubman not ever getting caught when she was on the Underground Railroad, how she was actually stopping to pray at certain points to be like, where does she go, how she was reading the sky, how she was a master astronomer and could read animals and could read the Earth and she was a nature woman and was able to use the Earth and use the stars and listen to bird sounds and use the plants to be able to find this medicine and this tapping in, so when I say tapping in, that's what I'm thinking about. Like, she's literally on the run, running for her life, with a bounty on her head and she’s stopping to pray and to get plants and to listen to the owl sounds, she knows where to go and to stop and get a word from our ancestors, and pause, and prayer is a form of rest. And so she was waking up from prophetic dreams saying my people are free and prophesying their freedom.
So this is what I hold to and this is why history in the archives are so important for this work and are so important for any future that we're trying to build out, if we don't go back and listen and tap in and get those inventive ideas and expand on them. We won't make it. So they have been my guides, they have been what has kept me going when I'm looking around and being like, “Oh, wow, things are on fire.” But I talk about that in a book, I say, you know, let's torch it then. If grind culture is what’s killing us, then let’s get together with the matches and let’s torch the grind. You know, let's torch it so that we all can burn it down and begin to build something new. And so I'm not hopeless, because I'm a historian and because I'm a researcher and because I am connected deeply to my ancestors. What they were doing is brilliance, is inventive, and they were doing it with so much less, they were doing it without a smartphone, they were doing it without ID, they didn't have autonomy over their own bodies. They were “owned” by someone else, they were not letting that idea hold them. They were remixing and being subversive and understanding that there are ways to resist, that there are ways to connect and they did it no matter what. And so a lot of people don't know the history you know, this culture does a really great job of erasing history of keeping us from it and taking it away. We think about all of the drama and people trying to keep history out of schools, and so I uplift in the book that this work all started with these fragmented parts of my history that you can go back into your history and that you can read the history of where we're from, and you can look to the past and look to the present to be able to build this new future.
I love this quote, Nikki Giovanni she said it, you know, she was at a speech I believe at the University Chicago years and years ago I read this speech and she said “If my ancestors can believe then I know I can” and I just sit with that I'm like, if my ancestors can believe then who am I not to believe in this moment that I can be free and that my body belongs to me and that liberation is possible and so it's going to be a deep deep individual work, but also collective work, but it's going to be work that people are going to have to take on and grab hold to, and slowly began to do the unraveling and healing work this work is an invitation to heal.
Ayana Young There is a quote you did with Patrisse Cullors, and it’s “Q&A: Nap Ministry’s Tricia Hersey Talks Rest and Racial Just” for Prism and you say “I want to go slow with it and be very realistic that this is going to be a slow deep unlearning. I'm very easy with people and tell them “Be easy on yourselves. I know you feel guilty. I know you feel shame. I know you grinded last night, because you have to get some extra money at work to live in a capitalist system, in a white supremacist system.” I understand there are limits and the boundaries. So that's why I ask people to begin to tap into their imagination. Rest is imagination work. It's about reclaiming and reimagining what you can be. It's about tapping into your senses in a way that this world hasn't allowed you to, you're gonna have to be flexible, you're going to have to be subversive.” And I am thinking about how when we, when we hear your work and these quotes, and we're reading your book, and you know, some of us are going to be drawn to it and we're going to feel and sense the truth in this, and of course, there's this, probably for some of us this urgent desire to figure it out and to be good at it and to to be healed and to be able to move on. I don't know what, I'm not sure what we're moving on to, but I'm sure that there's that thing in our mind that things “Okay, we're gonna do this,” and so I just want to talk about how we cannot, nor should we try to be perfect in our resistance. And I realize also that perfection and purity are romanticized in a culture that values output over the reality of people's lives. So what might we learn by embracing the mess and imperfection that comes with leaving behind the ways we have been brainwashed into mindless productivity? And on and on?
Tricia Hersey Yeah, that's a great question. Oh, my God, I mean, it really is like, where our healing lies, is where all of the energy for any type of justice work is going to lie. It's going to lie in the acceptance, in the messy, in the experimentation, I open up the book saying you know, this work is the output, this is the imagination and the dreams of an exhausted and curious Black woman. So I'm extremely curious. I'm extremely open to the idea of experimentation, to invention to like being able to use this beautiful body and brain and wholeness that I have to be able to say, “Hmm, what if,” you know, it kind of acts as question, what do you believe? So I'm always pushing myself and thinking about the idea of what if, you know, what could this be?
And you know Ayana, when I think about it, because I'm an artist, you know, I think my being an artist and having an art practice, since I was 15-16 years old, being a poet, a theater maker, installation artist, a writer, a person who really loves experimentation performance art, you know, ritual maker, I think it also goes back to the idea of how I was raised, you know, I was raised in the Black church, a Pentecostal Black church, a place where I would watch people literally chant and pray themselves free, I watched people, you know, catch the Holy Ghost and fall out and wake up from it and look totally different, and be healed from drug addiction and be healed from all these things, like I understood and saw what embodiment could do. Like I'm not afraid of embodiment, I’m not afraid of leaving, I’m not afraid of experimentation, that comes to me easy–to watch my ancestors, and parents take something from nothing and make it something and be able to like heal themselves and stay alive and my grandmother, being a refugee from Jim Crow terrorism, and my dad, you know, working all these jobs, and still being able to be an organizer and activist and seeing how community care and embodiment literally can save us and so I know for a lot of people, they may not come from that origin story. Maybe they're not an artist, but for everyone, everyone comes to this world with an imagination like our imagination, as bell hooks has said so brilliantly, is one of the greatest tools of those who are oppressed, the greatest tool, our imagination. Octavia Butler speaks in these ways as well, talking about the idea of what imagination and how we can hope and how we can be and how we can be a part of the solution, because there are millions and millions of infinite ideas that are out there waiting for us.
So I love that question and I love the idea of people understanding that this is about experimentation and when I say that to people, they look at me kind of like what, and I talk about the idea of imagination, how I see it being robbed from people younger and younger. Like when you think about young people and children. When I used to be a teacher working with young people, I mean, I'm talking about 11 to 18, you know, and they 11-12 year olds who are still who their imagination has been robbed, like, that whole idea of imagining something different has been robbed by the poverty of their communities, by the prison industrial complex, by capitalism, by violence in their communities, like, they literally have been robbed of this idea of imagination. And so I think about how resting is imagination work, it is this idea of daydreaming and imagining a new way, and how we won't be able to get there from an exhausted mind. So if we want to have imagination, if we want to tap into the infinite ideas that our imagination is waiting to give us, it won't come from an exhausted body and mind, like it just is impossible from a biological standard, from a spiritual place, you know, we are killing ourselves when it comes to our exhaustion and our sleep deprivation, and our exploitation from home, from work, or abuse.
And so I say to people, that daydreaming having space to just be, staring at a tree, imagining, so I teach people how to daydream, like I have these collective daydreaming activations that we host and we want to be having them at the rest temple here in Atlanta, pretty regularly where we bring people together and teach them how to reclaim your imagination and teach them how to collectively daydream, how to daydream with each other, how to let your mind wander how to experiment. And so this work is really about repairs, trying to get people to tap into the things that are already within them that have been stolen from us by these systems. Our Dreamspace has been stolen, our time has been stolen, our ability to just be has been stolen, our idea of leisure has been stolen from us, the idea of having a hobby has been stolen from us, everything has been monetized by capitalism, everything goes back to making a dollar.
So this work wants people to tap into this idea of imagination. So there's a whole section in the book that's called Imagine, and it just speaks deeply about the ideas of what imagination is and my inspirations for imagination and how this work resides in the spirit of that. And so I really want people to begin to slowly see that their exhaustion will not give them nothing but more exhaustion.
Ayana Young I completely agree. And I think it's really important to differentiate imagination from a place of the programmed capitalists burnout mind versus imagination from a rested place, grounded in spiritual practice and liberation. I think they're very different. And I think back to conversations I've had with adrienne maree brown about the imagination battle and how we're living in somebody else's effed up imagination. And I really see that with so much of, I'll just say, the environmental movement, or the climate movement, for instance, I feel like folks are moving so fast and imagining, I guess, they think it's progress. In this way that is frightening, because they're selling it to us as an escape out of the depths of despair, or they're selling it to us as the solutions. And I see it more and more and more, especially over the past 10 years, the ramp-up of the technological imagination that will save us more, which is very different from a grounded, practice with spirit, to rest and imagine a way out of the mind that keeps creating and selling and honestly extracting.
I think that's really left out of the conversation, when we're thinking about these savior-imagined solutions. It's, the extraction is really out of control, like I just, you know, briefly want to talk about the imagined techno utopian world of green energy, for instance, in Alaska they are literally trying to open up the entire land base to mineral extraction to “save us” from climate change and fossil fuels. Which, if we were rested, and we were slower, and we could be like, wait a minute, actually, let's take a moment and think, “Hmm, do we want to burn more fossil fuels to extract more minerals, to then create new infrastructure and new systems to keep what going?” Like, what are we doing, what are we trying to continue? And does that have anything to do with our liberation? Or is this just a new form of these labor wars? Like, it doesn't quite make sense. But if we're too numb and too distracted, and exhausted, we're literally going to, we are in the middle of being duped in a whole other way. And that frightens me, and it kind of enrages me, which is another topic you brought up in your book is rage. So maybe we could riff off that a little bit. But like that rage that I'm feeling, even saying this like, what are we doing, we need to slow down and we need to shift our value system because we're about to go into a whole other level of dystopian I mean, we're in it, we're right here. And the last thing I'll say about that, the insanity of us grinding so hard to extract more, to buy more, to just to throw it away almost immediately. Like what are we doing?
Tricia Hersey It’s maddening. It’s so maddening that most of the time I can't make sense of it, or make my way out of it. Like I don't even know where to begin sometimes. And I just feel like it literally, it's a spiritual battle, like I have to take it back, as my father taught me, as a Black preacher, Black liberation theologian, that we have to understand that everything is happening is spiritual, you know that we are spiritual beings. And I think we forget that, that we're existing on this Earth, in this planet, on this planet, in this dimension, and we forgetting that we are actually existing as spiritual beings, and that all of this goes back to spirit, I think about the Civil Rights Movement and how, if you spoke with any of them, or Martin Luther King or any of his colleagues, they would always call what they were doing spiritual work. They always knew that, you know, human rights work and civil rights work and justice work is spiritual work. And I don't hear people talking about that enough. They talk about it from a shallow layer of thinking that policy can change things, but that's the white supremacy of it all because Indigenous people know that this is spirit, people who are in tune with the Earth understand that this is all a spiritual battle. And so a lot of times I call technology and social media demonic, I just named it as demonic the same way I named white supremacy as a demonic force. And I don't think a lot of people want to get into it and go deep into that and I think that's what my theology and my theologian mind and interests are coming in where I understand that we are battling against, you know, spirit, there's a spiritual war happening, that we're going to have to tap into that. And that's why resting being a spiritual practice opens up itself for us to lay ourselves, our weary bodies down into this spiritual place, for us to gain some type of care, and soothing and some calm and a balm, you know, for us to go in and receive these, these spiritual powers that are waiting for us, that resting is waiting for us to lay our bodies down and, just stop and make sense.
And when you talk about us just going and going and we're being duped. It's like, yeah, we're being duped because we won't stop enough to be like, wait a minute, no one's stopping anyone. It's like, all these people acting out of exhaustion, out of violence out of the lens and ideology of white supremacy and capitalism and no one's stopping to be like, “Hey, wait a minute, what's up with that?” And so I think people feel numb to speaking, I think people have no bandwidth. You know, I think that we are so exhausted on every level physically, mentally, spiritually, that we are so hemmed up, I was just reading an article that, um, 70% of Americans right now are looking for second and third jobs to be able to try to deal with the recession. And I'm like, what, like, in this exhausted state that we're in with the pandemic, that many people are working, looking for even more work, even more labor, even more time on a clock, to just be able to eat. And so when I think about the rage, the rage, I feel about what the systems are doing to us what they have done to us and our bodies that they continue to push us to, we don't have the energy to let alone be working one job right now, now people to be able to live in their homes, afford rent, eat, feed their families, they literally have to work three jobs, look for more work, always be going. And so every person's entire life is being surrounded by labor and doing their thing. So that's not being human. That's not a human being. Humans aren't meant to function like that, you know, we aren't meant to be working like a machine. So all I can say is that I hope, I have deep hope for what the divine can offer, I have deep hope for spirit. And I have deep understanding that what we, what we think we see, what we think is happening, there's always something behind it, there's always something working behind the scenes, and that resting can help to amplify the spirit for us, you know, it can help to bring that spirit louder and closer, so that we are able to grab on and hold on. And so I always tell people, we won't make it without rest. We won't make it without connecting to this is a spiritual practice as a political practice, as a social justice ideal, as a public health practice.
I mean, it lands in so many different ways that it's so important that we begin to expand our minds. And that we began to just surrender to rest, you know, surrender to the idea that we aren't going to be able to do everything. And so I talked about that in my book, like, how I got to this was literally I was dying, I literally used rest to save my life. And I'm not being you know, this is, I'm literally feeling like I was dying, you know, and so rest became something that allowed me to save my life. And I focused solely on it. And I just had to have a faith walk, I had to leap without a net and and to say, I don't know what it's going to be, you know, but it can't be this. Similar to my grandmother who left the deep part of Mississippi to go to Chicago during the Great Migration running from racial terror there and she didn't know what it would be when she landed in Chicago, she just knew it ain't gonna be this. And so this idea of hoping for the future, of leaping, of imagining, of trying to make space to just be to allow yourself to tap in to slow down. And so I am really hopeful about the idea of what could happen for us when we are able to slow down and we're gonna have to do it, we're gonna have to snatch it, no one is going to do it for us. That's another thing we're going to have to process and really sit with, everything in collaboration and its culture is for not to rest, and so this is an outlier movement. It's a movement of experimentation, and investigation. It's a slow movement. It's a political refusal.
Ayana Young In a sense, the rage you're speaking about is respectful. It's really acknowledging what people are going through and the oppression and the hate that the system must have for people, because what's really outrageous is that there is so much money in the world, like, extraordinary amounts of money. And when folks can't even have a steady stabilized comfortable home and healthy food on their table. When other people literally have too much money. They don't even know what to do with it all. Anywhere they–
Tricia Hersey Wasteful, they throw food out, you know, like, yeah, when you think about it, yeah–
Ayana Young It's outrageous and that rage, I think, is warranted because we see the folks on the mega yachts, which literally mean nothing to them, like these mega yachts, and all this luxury is so meaningless. And yet, and there's other people who can't even feed their families without going into massive exhaustion and again, it's like, who are we working for? And where there is enough money to go around, there's enough money to pay people to rest honestly–
Tricia Hersey There's abundance, this scarcity model that we're living under, there’s so much abundance, there's enough, the Earth can provide enough food and water and care and lovers and, you know, money and ideas for all of us. But because we have been trained in a scarcity model that because this whole entire culture has been built on a model of scarcity that makes people so deeply brainwashed to the fact that there is an abundance available to us. And so it's so correct that when you think about the money, when I think about the idea, there's trillions of dollars, like what is it? What is even trillions of dollars look like? You know, when I think about the trillions and billionaires it's like, really, like, this is what we're doing, like, why is that necessary? Why do you need to have more? Why do you need another dollar? Why couldn't some of that money go, like you said, pay people to rest, give reparations, you know, use the money so that climate change isn't happening at such a rapid rate, that we could be doing so much. But that's when I start to bring up the demonic nature of it all, the spiritual aspects that we are fighting against, and that we are within and monitored, what Martin Luther King Jr. would call a spiritual deficiency. He always told the culture, when he talked about what was happening, when he talked about what was happening with racial terror in a culture, he said it’s happening because there's a spiritual deficiency upon us that people are suffering deeply from a spiritual deficiency. He always wrote about this in his sermons, if people read his sermons, he was always giving sermons and using a word of spiritual deficiency. And I always sat with that word, like oh that’s so deep, the idea of a deficiency of spirit. And I feel like he was saying that back in like the 50s and now people are, we're here now, we have more things that are driving us deeper, like technology, like I really believe that technology and social media is really driving us deeper and deeper into deep, deep spiritual deficiency, deep, deep disconnection, deep exhaustion. Really it's a disease. It's an addiction, an obsession that I talk about in my book, if we don't begin to examine it deeply, I'm not sure what's going to happen, you know, I'm not sure collectively what will happen and so I'm always offering to people to do these detoxes offline, to just put your phone down, to go back to the ancient and vintage ways of connecting with people to like turn off that antenna and turn on your own internal spiritual antenna to be able to listen and hear and so when I go on these 30 day sabbaths and I'm like off the phones, off technology, off emails. I literally feel like a new person I feel like I'm buzzing on another level of connection. So much comes to me, my sleep is so good. I wake up I was hand-writing 18 pages of notes around ideas and poetry and journaling and it feels like an antenna it's turned on and I'm able to hear what really the Earth wants to tell me, what spirit wants to offer, what my body wants to say. And so until we can begin to turn off some of the noise and, and deaden the noise and have more silence and have more spaces to rest and we do that intentionally and with care. And we do that collectively, and we do that meticulously, that we actually make space for that we just say, “No,” you're gonna have to say no, and it might not be easy, you're gonna have to heal from the idea of boundaries, not having healthy boundaries, of a people pleasing, you're gonna have to, like really begin to hold yourself in such a graceful and merciful way to understand that you will have to say no, because the systems will continue to say yes, they'll continue to put push, they'll continue to put things on your calendar, they'll continue to say, “Can you work two more hours?” Can you get four more jobs? You know, I remember there was at a time when my dad was working three jobs, you know, and I'm just like, how is a person able to manage three jobs, you know, how is that literally all you do is get up work and go to bed, there's no living in between. So we aren't living, we're like the walking dead. And I want to bring us back to life and bring us back to humaneness. And that is through rest, I believe rest will simply make us more human.
Ayana Young I just really want people to understand this offering in long form is deep, and it's something that you can spend time with and get off the screen with, and be with, and pray with, and meditate with, and pause with, and go back to, and you can share it with your community. And, and so I really just want to bring it full circle to the beginning of our conversation that we now have a place where we can be slower with you. And I'm really grateful for that. Because I think that, you know, social media is definitely, in many ways, evil, but there's times where you can go on social media and see work from folks like you and be inspired. And it's like that little spark, you know, it's a spark, and then you take that spark, and you get off the screen, and you go and you study and you sit and you rest with and so this is an opportunity for folks to do that. And I'm really grateful for you for taking all the time and the attention that it must have been for you to create a book and also share with us.
Tricia Hersey Yes, it’s been a labor of love, thank you so much. I want this to feel like a lullaby, read it to yourself and to each other. So one of the reviewers called it a lullaby of liberation. They said it felt like a lullaby of liberation. So this is an invitation to just slow it down. I ask all book groups who use it, to make space during your book meetings for resting, for naps, even for meditation, don't rush through this book, to come back to it, to underline it, to highlight, you know, to offer up passages that feel like a meditative moment. And so I'm so grateful for the long form and for this opportunity for people to have it in their hands. It's like, it's a legacy piece. And I'm in awe of what it can and will do for people. I know that I love it and I feel so proud of the work and so I hope others will as well.
Ayana Young And you know, when the internet goes down, you'll have a book which–
Tricia Hersey Exactly, when it burns down you'll have this tucked away in a drawer and pull it out. Share it with the family.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Real J Wallace and Fabian Almazan Trio. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson. As a reminder, an extended edited verson of this episode is available at Patreon.com/forthewild.