Cease
Winter Solstice, 2023
For the month before these rains came, it frosted most nights on the farm. When it frosts we have to wait until the crops have thawed in the field before harvesting, otherwise they will rot quickly. Frost typically bursts the cells within the plant structure; incredibly, most crops will heal themselves, a few hours of sun allowing the cells to knit back together. While this miracle is taking place, our normally busy harvest mornings turn into a waiting game. We figure out little tasks that can still be done while things are frozen, we clean, we watch. It’s a bit awkward, and sometimes stressful. There is so much to do, but the time has not yet come to do it.
How stressful we find it to just stop. How hard it can feel in our bodies, how impossible for our minds. “Nothing is harder to do than nothing,” Jenny Odell wrote in How to Do Nothing. And yet, in the face of weaponized productivity, commercialized social media, and our default way of seeing in which the other “exists only as an instrument or means to an end,” she insists that we must find the discipline to do exactly nothing, or risk losing our humanity.
We have all been watching, of course, these last few months, the extremes of what happens when we cannot fathom doing nothing, when every action necessitates a response, when other humans are seen only as a means to an end. Doing nothing is antithetical to our entire political and capitalist regime. Our politicians cannot even breathe the word “ceasefire.”
But we must practice. We must learn to “protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for community.” We must find out what it takes to draw ourselves to a halt against the tremendous momentum we’ve built up.
Every winter solstice the earth models for us how to do this. She pulls daylight back to its bare minimum, grinding plant growth to a near halt. She lays frost on the ground, literally freezing life in place. A big effort for a non-result. For “doing nothing,” as Odell says, “is hard.” It is not passive. It takes a lot of action to create even the tiniest pause. It is hard work and it may be the only work that matters.
Let us follow the earth’s example, however we can. I am on my way to spend a week doing very nearly nothing, except knit my cells back together. I hope all of you find some nothing this week too.
Love,
Sarah
