Rest Is Our Ritual
They speak of rest as something you buy, something you schedule, something that makes you easier to manage. Too often, rest is packaged as quietness—as if to rest is to stop asking, stop naming, stop disrupting.
But our rest has always been more than that.
Our rest is ancestral. It remembers the ones who were denied it, the ones whose bodies were claimed by systems of labor and control. It carries the memory of survival, of persistence when the world demanded exhaustion.
Our rest is not for productivity. It is not so we can give more to systems that take.
Our rest is for restoration—for returning to ourselves and one another.
Our rest is collective. It does not live only in a nap or a soft ritual alone. It is found in shared meals, in the holding of children, in safe passage home, in the way community reminds us: you are not carrying this by yourself.
Our rest is refusal. Refusal to be measured by output. Refusal to believe our worth is tied to how much we endure. Refusal to treat our bodies as endless supply.
Our rest is sacred. It is not luxury—it is lineage.
It is ritual that binds us back to the holy ground of our own being.
Our rest is not only memory—it is vision.
It restores us so we can imagine, so we can create, so we can keep shaping a world where rest is no longer rationed.
I may not rest in the way the world tells me to.
I rest in the way my people always have—
as protest, as prayer, as preparation.
Rest is our ritual.
Rest is how we remember.
Rest is how we rise.
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We have never known a world without violence.
So we must each ask: what side are we on?
To be of an oppressed people does not always mean we are being oppressed.
Sometimes we, too, can hold power, can control, can uphold the very systems that harm us.
And to be survivors is not a choice we made—
it is a condition forced upon us by violence.
We did not ask for it, yet we carry it.
If we are protected by these systems—by intention or by silence—
what are we willing to surrender so that a world without violence can live?
And if we are harmed by these systems,
what are we willing to build together so that liberation is not only imagined,
but embodied?
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With love and honor,
Chriseithia
Founder of Black Self Wellth™
This is sacred work, not open source.
Please honor the heart behind these words.
All rights reserved © Chriseithia Collins | Black Self Wellth™