This is a sequel to Tricia Hersey's best-selling 2022 manifesto Rest Is Resistance. Rest Is Resistance describes a whole new way of looking at work and rest: seeing ourselves as sacred and deserving of deep self-care. This companion book contains poems, drawings, meditations, and deeply grounded cries fromn the heart to help all people move towards wholeness, freedom and justice.
—Hardback, 160 pp., published by Little, Brown Spark, 2024.
We don’t believe we are worthy of rest unless we burn ourselves out to accomplish it. Our thinking has been limited by disconnection, sleep deprivation, and the unattainable call for perfection. The systems will never give us rest. It is something we must create for ourselves and each other.
Just as the North Star guided the enslaved on their journeys to freedom, visionary artist and founder of The Nap Ministry Tricia Hersey leads us to imagine a new world: one in which we subvert the narrative of productivity at all costs and embrace rest as a healing spiritual practice.
We Will Rest! is a modern sacred object, medicine for a sick and exhausted world. Weaving together meditations and poetry with storytelling and art, Hersey provokes liberation through refusal and trickster rebellion in the face of capitalism and white supremacy.
There is another way. Focus on the escape. Focus on the transformation. We can just be. We are beautiful. We are enough. We are escape artists. We Will Rest!
***
Have you ever noticed
when you ask for rest
the body becomes a holy trumpet
the walls come tumbling down?