Dear Caminoheads,

I get now why Phil used to “self criticize” when he would write “he was whining”. I am a lot like that, as if it is not ok to whine, but there are days, weeks, months, seasons, even years or decades, that just invite us to whine, whine wholeheartedly, openly, whine like W H I N E!!!!!! I have a W H I N E!!!!!!!! momentum myself right now… you know the saying “the proof is in pudding”… well, here is one: my right shoulder is painful due to some lesion I have in the collarbone, and since Saturday, my left shoulder and arm are painful too as I had the booster covid shot… But this one is not even in the top of my list of things to whine about…

Maybe the whining (W H I N I N G) is just for a signal that it is time to “rest”, real rest.

Maybe this is the time?

“REST

is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also physiologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull’s eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.

This template of natural exchange is the breath, the autonomic giving and receiving that forms the basis and the measure of life itself. We are rested when we are a living exchange between what lies inside and what lies outside, when we are an intriguing conversation between the potential that lies in our imagination and the possibilities for making that internal image real in the world; we are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning. When we give and take in an easy foundational way we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested. To rest is not self indulgent, to rest is to prepare to give the best of ourselves, and to perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given. … “

‘REST’ From
CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte & Many Rivers Press 2015

Tired loves,

Cris