Where Do You Rest?
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
We meet once a month. Eight fabulous woman writers. Wine, bread, cheese, gossip. One or two or three of us present our work, which is then hotly discussed and debated. Sometimes, we can’t agree: should there be more detail, or less? It hardly matters: there’s fierce belief in the air. And then, if there’s time, we write. Someone throws out a writing prompt or two, meant to get us started. This one stayed with me for days:
Where do you rest?
I rest in Facebook, gmail, the blogosphere. I take breaks without ever leaving the computer screen. Someone I’ve never met is “baking Christmas cookies. Wtf?” A woman I barely know is “happily going to her studio to work”. My niece “needs a couple strokes of really good luck right now..”
Richard Grusin writes, “We become simultaneously both the subject and object of contemporary media.” We are constantly seeing and being seen. We are public and private, always and everywhere.
I wonder: where did I rest before social networking? Did I spend more time in cafes, art galleries, the street? Or was I simply at that same computer screen (OK, different computer), working? Why can’t I remember?
Fifteen years ago there was no email. We used the phone. If we had to phone all the people we now email in a day, we’d fall to the ground, exhausted.
Where do you rest?
When I go to Gambier Island for a month, as I have done the past two summers, all I do the first week, is sleep. I sleep in, write for an hour, have a nap, write for another hour…you get the idea. I sleep like a professional, like it’s my job to sleep. I tell the next-door- neighbour, I. Can’t. Believe. How. Tired. I. Am. I. Can’t. Stop. Sleeping. and she says gently, You. Must. Need. It.
The bedroom in that house on Gambier has a window facing the forest. Deer sometimes saunter by, peering in at the window, like it’s their personal drive-in movie.
I sleep very well in that room.
Where do you rest?
The other months of the year my dreams are full of careening cars, lost lecture notes, a film shoot for which equipment was never booked, snarling children, and deadlines long overdue.
Sleep is not always rest.
And rest is sometimes, too, the act of cooking, of washing and chopping the purple-and-orange organic carrots I got at the farmer’s market that day, , the rinsing of basmati rice, sauteeing onions in a big, wide pan, the radio with its accompanying sizzle of ambient news.
How do you rest?
