12 x 12 original mixed media painting created with paper collage and oil paint on cradled panel.
I used to think that resting was for losers. To prove your strength and worth, you need to keep going. If I wasn't moving on my path, I was wasting precious time I couldn't get back. I wonder if this refusal to acknowledge my humanity and its limitations grew out of the very real physical limitations I bumped up against as a child with juvenile diabetes. What exactly was I trying to prove to myself?
Resting used to feel like a punishment rather than a nurturing, healing practice. As I've grown to love the gift of this temporal body, what it can do and accepting what it can't, I've come to love the pauses (or selahs) that break up my movement on a path. In the rest, I can get perspective, gather needed mental, emotional and physical energy for the next part of the journey, I can review, evaluate, learn and dream. Rest is never wasted. Selah, or pauses, can be sacred.
"But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” And he lay down and slept under a broom tree. And behold, an angel touched him and said to him, “Arise and eat.” And he looked, and behold, there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. And he ate and drank and lay down again. And the angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, “Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.” And he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God." I Kings 19:4-8
