I need to rest.
But taking a break isn't easy.
Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place for the woo curious to explore spirituality, culture, and humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…
I grew up in a road tripping family.
Most summers, my parents would load us up into whatever long-suffering van we were currently cruising in, pack a cooler full of bologna sandwiches, and tell us to play The Alphabet Game to pass the long hours on the road to a not-very-glamorous destination: a southern Missouri campground where we caught tadpoles and canoed down a river. Pikes Peak in Colorado, where the altitude made me so nauseated that I spent half of the time at the top hunched over a toilet. The mecca of Missouri entertainment, Branson, where we watched a family of Elvis impersonators and played mini golf.
It’s funny how certain memories from my childhood seem to adhere themselves to the edges of my mind like a photo pasted into a scrapbook. I clearly remember the long, empty stretches of highway across Kansas on the way to Colorado, where the oil rigs bobbed up and down like one of those old-school drinking bird contraptions.
The clouds seemed to hang lower there. The sky seemed bigger. It was hard to tell where the pale blue faded into the wan yellow of the fields that surrounded the interstate. Even the billboards were scant, making the Alphabet Game nearly impossible.
This was the part of the road trip that was usually the quietest. Without a cell phone glued to my hand or a pair of headphones in my ears, as a child, I let myself fall into the emptiness of the moment. With my mind cleared of distractions, I began to hear sounds I wouldn’t normally: the hum of the tires against the road. The murmur of talk radio juxtaposed with spurts of static as we ventured in and out of reception. The faint whistle of wind seeping in from a barely-cracked window.
I leaned my head against the car window and watched the sun crawl across the sky. It was easy to rest, to not think of anything except for whether I would be able to count a hundred oil rigs before we crossed in to Colorado.
My mind wandered, and I let it roam across the open fields, in search of nothing and everything at the same time.
I have forgotten how to rest my mind the way I was able to when I was a child.
And it’s probably because, as an adult, I have turned my brain into the antithesis of an expansive field: a pulsating, overstimulated, neon-lit version of Las Vegas.
Here, ideas push and shove against each other, begging for my attention. I read a poem on Instagram and think, “I should write more poetry.” So I follow the blinking, buzzing fluorescent sign, open up one of my ten partially-filled notebooks, and see a half-baked list of tarot spreads that I scrawled but have not yet tried.
I change course and decide to gamble: I reach for my tarot deck and, just as I’m about to start shuffling, I catch sight of a book on wellness that I’ve been meaning to read. Instantly, I buy tickets to that show, take a seat, and flip the opening-act pages…until my mind grows restless yet again, itching to get up and hit the streets once more in search of the jackpot, my Next Big Idea.
Under the harsh, colorful glare of my media-saturated life, I struggle to think, truly think. To let my mind actually be my mind. I do not know what I truly want to explore creatively because I haven’t let myself try to find it.
I hesitate to leave the whiplash pace of Vegas and return to the open fields where all I have is my thoughts.
Because, truthfully, I’m scared that my thoughts, when they stand alone, simply will not be good enough.
Or worse yet, they won’t exist at all.
As a child, before going to sleep, I would close my eyes, watch a sea of colored dots appear, one by one, and begin to dance behind my eyelids. With these pinpricks of light, I made shapes, imagined stories, and wrote the preamble to my dreams.
When I finally drifted off to sleep, my mind created art. Sometimes, my dreams were surrealist paintings where time melted off the edge of the canvas and faces were blurred like someone had run an eraser across them. Other nights, I was an Impressionist playing with light and shadow as I tumbled through one portal after the next.
The next morning, I woke up with the smoke of these otherworldly stories rising towards my ceiling, and though my mind couldn’t always catch my dreams before they disappeared, the faint outline of what I had imagined remained.
Rest made it possible for me to glimpse the sort of creative landscape that I couldn’t access when I was awake. It’s clear that rest and creativity have always been intertwined for me.
My best ideas come to me when I do not ask them to come. They come when I am at ease, when my mind is loose and unstructured, twirling under an endless, cloudless sky.
I haven’t had many moments like these lately.
I know that it is time to rest. To return to the place where my mind can wander down the long stretches of highway, to meander down the gravel roads that fork away from the main path, to run through the open fields of possibility.
This is only possible if I pause my consumption. If I pause my production. If I just…pause.
In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron suggests an exercise called “media deprivation,” where one does not consume any content of any kind for a week. That means no social media, no books, no podcasts…no input of any kind. She says that this act allows access to the “inner silence” where one’s creativity can finally speak in its own, unfiltered voice.
And silence is exactly what I need. So, for the next week, I am going to do just that: save for a few texts and phone calls to my partner, I am going to make a conscious, concerted effort to check out. I’m going to delete social media apps, leave my phone behind more often than not, and do my best to rest.
Which is not easy. Every fiber of my being itches to consume. Capitalism has taught me that more is more. If I know more, read more, speak more, write more, think more…then I will be more.
But I am interested in being less. I have a hunch that doing so will lead me to what I truly want to create.
Tomorrow, I leave on another road trip.
My sister, my niece, my best friend Daniel, and I will pile into an SUV, not a tired van, and drive south. I will eat Twizzlers and play the Alphabet Game. I will look out the window and watch the landscape swell into mountains, shift into trees covered in moss and finally, transform into marshlands that lead to the ocean.
For a week, I will live in a house where I can see the waves from my bedroom window. I will teach my nieces how to make a witch’s castle with wet sand, and I will walk alongside the ocean under a setting sun. Instead of reels, posts and words on a page, I will consume the salt air, the sound of the tide, and the feeling of water against my skin.
I will not write. At least not on paper. I will trace my name in the sand closest to the foamy edges of broken waves and watch each letter erode and blur until what I have written becomes something else entirely.
I will remember that I do not always have to consume. Sometimes, life asks us to be consumed. To stand still, away from the maddening crowd, and to allow my edges to soften until I become something else entirely.
When I return, rested and restored, I trust that I will know exactly what I am meant to create next.
Do you find it easy or difficult to rest? I’d love to hear about times you’ve intentionally disconnected + what you learned.
✨Cards for Humanity: The Four of Swords ✨
Whether you’re into tarot or not, here’s a few things to consider about this weird thing called life.
As a child, I loved it when my dad would “burrito” me before I was about to go to sleep. Basically, he rolled me up in a blanket and tucked me in really tightly until I was like a little mummy, ready for burial. Except I was five and supposed to go to sleep. There was something strangely comforting about this posture, which explains why my favorite pose in yoga is definitely savasana.
Despite its somewhat funereal vibes, the Four of Swords reminds me of the comfort of being burritoed when I was younger. This card is a sanctuary of sorts, a place of stillness and rest where one can meditate, breathe, and hone in on what is truly important. Indeed, the figure depicted lies on his back, eyes closed and hands clasped in a prayer-like gesture of reception.
Above him, the three swords that appeared in the previous card float, blades poised to pierce through his vulnerable body should something shake them loose—they represent the past pain experienced when pursuing something that was not aligned.
But the figure closes his eyes to these looming weapons that threaten to pry him away from this meditative moment and push him towards intellectual battles and unproductive lines of thinking that divide his attention—the suit of swords represents knowledge, cognitive processes and ideas that govern our decisions.
Instead, the sword that lies buried beneath him is what he seeks: this singular understanding that he is meant to explore next. He instinctively understands that this is only accessible through rest and stillness. If his mind is constantly busy, spinning from one of the three swords to the next, he will never be able to transcend the busyness of the above-the-surface information and delve deeper into the truth he is being called to seek.
The stained glass window above him depicts a scene that calls to mind another card, the Six of Pentacles, where we are called to be generous with our resources and share with our community. The figure in the Four of Swords will, too, eventually be called back into a place of action where he is meant to share the wisdom and intellect that he has gained in this time of rest.
But now is not that time. Now is the time for pause, for deep stillness and connection. When the Four of Swords appears in a reading, step back from the habits and lines of thinking that make your mind race from one idea to the next. Carve out spaces where you can rest so profoundly that you are truly alone with your thoughts, not simply consuming those of others.
Rest is an integral part of the work, and it is an artform in its own right. Easier said than done in a busy, hyper-connected world, but take a cue from Pamela Colman Smith’s artwork, burrito yourself up, close your eyes, and let your mind wander for as long as it takes to come home to your personal truth.
✨Prompts | The Four of Swords✨
Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.
☀️ What does the word “rest” mean to me intellectually? Physically? Spiritually?
☀️ What everyday actions can I take to carve out moments of mental stillness?
☀️ When I am alone with my thoughts, what truths emerge?
☀️ How does my creativity speak when I create space for it?
✨Weekly Mantra✨
Write it down. Say it out loud. Share it with a friend.
My rest does not have to have a purpose other than restoration.
It should come as no shock that I am taking a short hiatus from Everyday Woo. Free newsletters will return on August 16th, and I’ll resume paid content on August 12th. Thanks for allowing me the time to rest.
Enjoy your break 😊
Have a nice a really well rested break !!! 🥳🥳🥳❤️❤️