To sleep, to dream...

Girlettes in my new school locker! ❤️❤️❤️

"I prioritize sleep", said a coworker who has so much going on, I'd commented that they must not get much sleep.
"I don't think well if I don't get enough sleep," they said.

I agreed wholeheartedly and told them I'd slept ten hours the night before, to process the overload of incoming new experiences.

I LOVE that some members of the younger generation consider it a colonizer/capitalist trick to emphasize #HardWork and #LackOfSleep as moral values.

ABOVE: Kehinde Wiley, The Death of Hyacinth (Ndey Buri Mboup), 2022, via Museum of Fine Art, Houston

The founder of the Nap Ministry movement, Tricia Hersey, for instance, says, Rest Is Resistance and wrote a book of that title. She says:

"We have been brainwashed by ... this violent culture that wants to see us working 24 hours a day, that... views our divine bodies as a machine.
We believe our bodies are portals. They are sites of liberation, knowledge, and invention that are waiting to be reclaimed and awakened by the beautiful interruptions of brutal systems that sleep and dreaming provide."

And--wow!--this:
"Our dream space has been stolen, and we want it back. We will reclaim it via rest."
--NPR, All Things Considered, interview with Tricia Hersey*, 12/27/22

OhMygod, yes. A central childhood memory:
My mother's mother (born 1900, indirectly from a slave-holding family) standing at the bottom of the stairs at 7 a.m. every morning of our visits, clapping and calling out, "Rise and shine, sleepyheads!"
Even when were visiting her on our holiday vacation time.

I always hated and resented that, but also felt the weight of my Grandmother's view of my "failure".
She's the one who said of me, "I can't understand her--she has no ambition." She's been dead almost forty years, but her dread judgment that has stayed with me.
What a legacy...

I still feel the need to prove that she was wrong, too:
that I always have had "ambition" to move (ambulate) toward things I love.
To her, those things had no value unless they were recognized and rewarded––socially, if not monetarily--like her gardening (and it was amazing!) leading to her becoming Chair Woman of the Lady's Gardening Club.

Anyway--I was thinking about that because of my lovely coworker (the one who took extra time to show me around)--and because I again slept ten hours last night--
And woke up with a good idea!

I'd been fretting about how to help a student read Romeo & Juliet, and something came to me while I was sleeping.

Actually, maybe more, I was pondering how to help the teacher help the student.
There is an art to being an assistant that I need/want to learn:
How to mediate for the good of all?
How to practice "conflict transformation" (a term I just learned via Hersey)?

I ran my idea past my former coworker Abby, who has a Masters in Special Ed--Autism, and she thought it was a good one, and suggested some ways to phrase it effectively.
So helpful!

Sleep Spirituality

ABOVE: Photo by Charlie Watts from an ongoing photography project curated by Tricia Hersey. Photo and quote below from this article:
"Tricia Hersey, a testimony on liberation theology and rest as inheritance", by Tempestt Hazel.

Tricia Hershey comes out of the Black church. She says:

"The Nap Ministry ... came out of the fact that I’m a preacher’s kid who was raised in the Black church and has always seen the Black church as a place of liberation—I’m blessed in that way.

"Though a lot of people have seen the Black church as a place of oppression and abuse, for me it was a liberating place to see Black people take their own spirituality and relationship to God into their own hands and remix it through a lens that looks like liberation.

"When those [who were] teaching white Christianity were giving us their religion, we took it and remixed it into something for ourselves. I think it’s important to know that. A lot of people gloss over that.

"And while the Black church and Christianity, in general, have a lot to be critiqued, I think the Black church is unique in that it’s one of the only institutions outside of slavery that we’ve had autonomy around, that we’ve owned, and that is still here."

When (white) people condemn religion, they often are not hearing or acknowledging that religion plays roles in cultures and communities other than theirs (ours).
 
What I hear is condemnation of the modern Trump-style Christianity.
I share the concern! 

Have you see this:
"A former evangelical leader is sounding the alarm about the direction his religion is headed in. Christianity Today Editor: Evangelicals Call Jesus 'Liberal' and 'Weak'

"Moore told NPR [8/8/23]... that multiple pastors had told him they would quote the Sermon on the Mount, specifically the part that says to “turn the other cheek,” when preaching. Someone would come up after the service and ask, 'Where did you get those liberal talking points?'

“When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis."

When we condemn "religion", I think of something Marz told me:
that when she was a high school student in Japan (in the early 2000s), her fellow students didn't even know who Jesus was.

I love that reminder that when we speak as white, middle-class Americans of Christian heritage, what we consider "religion" isn't even recognized in much of the world--or accepted in the Americas.
What do we mean when we say "religion"?
Indigenous religions, for instance, are very different from the religion of European colonizers. 

Sleep Science

My body reminded me that when it's rested, it will let me know.
I went to bed at 6 p.m. last night, and woke up refreshed three hours later. I read for a couple hours, woke up again at 4:30 a.m. and thought--why not get up?
So I did.

I trust my sleep cycle will sort itself out. I know I'm lucky that way--a lot of people's sleep is all messed up. I wonder if that is a problem of the modern world, with our fake illumination...
_______________________

I've always processed ideas and emotions while asleep--and that's sound science.
From the NIH:
"The function of sleep within the realm of learning [1], memory [2], physical recovery [3], metabolism [4] and immunity [5] is well documented across species."

Hersey is also points out the CDC has named sleep deprivation a public health crisis:

"I talk a lot about my divinity degree, but I have a undergrad degree in public health and community health. So I know the beauty of looking at this message from the science of sleep.
. . . Three of the top diseases - high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes - can be linked back to sleep deprivation. "

The NIH says:

"Reduced sleep duration has been linked to 7 of the 15 leading causes of death in the U.S., including
cardiovascular [heart] disease, malignant neoplasm [cancer],
cerebrovascular disease [blood flow to brain],
accidents, diabetes,
septicemia [blood poisoning by bacteria],
and hypertension [high blood pressure]...."