Restless Resting
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Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash
In this first episode of Tide to the Moon, host Kate Lawrence shares her yearning to honour a secular sabbath day of rest, and how her first attempt unfolded, not quite as she imagined.
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First episode
Transcript for the podcast Tide to the Moon
Episode 1: Restless Rest
[MUSIC]
Host Kate Lawrence
Welcome to Tide to the Moon, a podcast about yearning, and learning, to dance with the rhythms of the Universe. Episodes drop on the new moon and the full moon.
My name is Kate Lawrence and I am your host, and this is the very first fledgling, delicate, tentative foray into the world for this work, this creation, this offering of sorts.
I hold it gently in my hands, with few expectations of its value, but a healthy respect for its role as the place of beginning.
And I’m going to force myself to stand tall, after I press publish, to look you in the eye, and remind myself, thanks to Theodore Roosevelt and Brene Brown, that I am in the arena and that is what counts.
[Music]
Some people have a way of holding memory, memories of me, that I’m not altogether comfortable with. At a family dinner not too very ago my 30 year old niece said loudly
‘You always gave the best presents Aunty Katie.’
I puffed slightly, sitting as I was next to my sister and thinking I was about to outshine her for a moment.
‘Remember the Christmas you gave me mice.’
Oh, a dim and dull painful memory awakes.
Mice. Did I really give small child mice. Not a puppy, or a kitten, or even fish, but vermin, yeah they were white vermin, but vermin.
As I remember it, my niece was excited, her parents gave me murderous looks and I waved happlily goodbye as the mice and the whole family headed off to their new home.
A few days later my niece stopped liking them.
‘Yeah, one on them bit me.’ The adult niece laughs as she shares this further horror with the table.
And before that long ago New Year had even begun the mice came back to me, as smelly and pink eyed as when they’d left.
Luckily the shop was willing to take them back, and luckier still, they’re cheap because I did not get a refund.
And not for the first time I wished people didn’t remember things that I’d done.
Another example comes from a few years ago when my teenage son and I walked up MtMacedon, a beautiful 600 metre climb from our house, through eucalypt forests, tree fern gullies and congregations of grass trees, on the cooler southern slopes of the range.
I was so impressed with myself and enamored of the task that I declared I would make it my routine to walk up the Mount every week.
My error was that I made this declaration in the presence of my 15 year old son. He was quick to pour his scornful doubt on my vision and he was proved right, as I haven’t actually walked up Mt Macedon since then.
He likes to remind me of this whenever I declare a commitment to a new action or a pattern or routine, which is what he did when I told him two weeks ago, that from now on I was going to make Sunday a day of rest and relaxation.
‘Ahh, is that before or after you walk up Mt Macedon’
[MUSIC]
Years ago I met a woman who had had a very difficult childhood and a chaotic and drama filled adult life. She had escaped a violent relationship, struggled to look after her two children, to the point that one of them was in state care, and then she found, or was found by God. She joined a church, an evangelical, born again Hill Song type church and that church was the grounding, supportive and secure community that saved her.
I am not religious and the foundations of her church are opposed to every fibre in my being,
yet I envied her, the belonging that she felt.
I envied her Sundays, that had a purpose and rhythm. There was mmunity, singing, sharing food and a cessation of the normals of life - of work, shopping, cleaning any and all tasking, and the myriad of ways I make myself a hampster on the spinning wheel of life.
I envied the routine of attending a weekly service where life, life, was contemplated, morals sharpened and stories remembered.
As a person prone to living a pretty unstructured and chaotic life, I’ve never been a big wrap for order, routines, habits, customs, definitely not rules or regulations, yet I yearn for a container of rhythms and rituals within which to be chaotic.
But I don’t want a formula, I don’t want to be controlled or dominated by dogma, I don’t want strictures or scripture. I want and believe in the paradox of freedom within order.
But I can also see how I and perhaps many others had let the baby slide out as we tipped that churchy wet bathwater down the drain.
[MUSIC]
I have vague and fond memories of Sundays from my childhood. They weren’t much really, Mum dragged us all to church and sunday school and the rest of the day was slow, usually dull and nearly always boring. But in some ways its this boredom that I’m longing for, this slowing of time, this drawing down to presence with no agenda and a forced halting of the future.
But there is absolutely no way I will ever ever join the institution of a religion,
the hierarchy of a church,
the patriarchy of the father, son and holy ghost.
So over the years I have sporadically tried to find, join, connect or create a place to replicate this ideal, to fulfill my deep and repetitive yearning for the soothing rhythm of routines, the power of community and belonging, the rituals and reflections of the sacred within the secular, an examined life, a reverent life, a shared connection to place and liminal space.
Some things I tried were good, even great. Some I did for a while, some even embedded themselves in my deep memory and have come to the fore in times of crisis, but few if any have held their form or their hold on my daily or weekly life.
I started a women’s circle in my shed and that circle kept it’s shape and power for a full 18 months - it held me through the diagnosis and death of my partner, then just as it formed, it dissolved.
And I’ve read with joy and envy many books by folks who seem to speak my language. They extol the virtues and veracity of how such life serving practices can be done in a secular way, of how they do it in their family or their community.
But it always seems so particular, so personal and so dependent on an in tact family, or dumb luck location, or the extroversion of the writer or belonging to some kind of institution. And it seems unattainable, the stuff of fairy tales, yet my sense that this is the way I want to live deepens when I read, and my yearning swells, and this dissatisfaction seeps into my bones.
I hide behind my introversion, my social awkwardness and terror. I make the classic and fatal error of comparing myself with an ideal in a book, and I always come up short.
So I try to do something to take me closer to the ideal, but the impetus meets my isolation and I stumble, falter and stop not long after. Occasionally something blossoms for a while and I hope to revisit some of my previous efforts in later episodes.
But failure has never been a reason to stop trying, it is the only way to keep learning and discerning what is really wanted and what needs to happen.
And so another spark of inspiration has arrived recently and created the genesis of this project.
[MUSIC]
Recently I listened to an episode of a podcast called Shelter in Place. The episode is called Letting in the light and I highly recommend you listen to it and I’ll put a link in the show notes. It was published in October 2021.
It tells the story of Nikki who moves to new city, she doesn’t know anyone, she lives in share houses that feel like bus stops until she moves into another share house that feels friendly. One Friday night, when Nikki’s heading out for the evening, she steps into the lounge room and is totally effected by the atmosphere. It’s a mixture of the visuals - dim lighting and candles - and something else she couldn’t put her finger on, something like a deep sense of peace or as she says, ‘a feeling of love and quiet and security’.
The room has been set up by Jake, one of Nikki’s new housemates, to honour shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, and the rest of the episode explores Jake and his approach to shabbat and Nikki’s deepening understanding and connection to this weekly practice of a day of rest, ritual and renewal.
And it again taps the longing in me, the yearning I can’t shake or satisfy hangs around in my psyche, just below the surface over the coming days and I wonder what it would be like, and could I make it happen, this idea of a day of rest, one day of the week.
So of course, I do a bit of googling to see what people do on a secular sabbath and I come across the Sabbath Manifesto. I read through the list of ten things which all sound pretty good and reasonable - things like no technology, get outside, connect with loved ones etc etc , and then I reach one thing on that list, that really tickles my fancy enormously, it feels deeply indulgent and thrilling - The commandment is to drink wine.
Now maybe you’re thinking that isn’t the level of sacredness I ought to be aspiring to, but who I am to argue with the ancestors!
The decision is made, I’m going give it a crack
The following Sunday, which was two weeks ago, I begin.
I don’t start the day with a couple of glasses of wine but instead with my usual coffees, some journaling and a bit of word play.
I walk my dogs and swim in my local reservoir and in the early afternoon head to Melbourne to act in an amateur radio drama a friend is making, which is loads of fun.
In the late afternoon I lie on the couch and read for a bit. Then I sit up.
And there is an instant of idle, a split second of stasis, a tarrying of time and on the couch of calm, and into the breach, a thought rushes in:
‘I want to write about this, I need to make sense of this. I need something or someone to bear witness, I need to be held to be accountable. And maybe just maybe I might find others doing the same…’
For a moment I imagine a blog and in the very next breathe I realise it must be a podcast.
I am afterall a self declared ‘audio producer’.
And with that my moment of nothing became nothing.
Excitations fire around my mind and I suddenly make a move towards the banned computer.
But the urge is mild, and easy to resist.
I slump back to lie on the couch, body still as my mind fills with imaginings of this new project.
But there’s plenty of time.
[MUSIC]
So here I am, at the end of the first episode of this podcast ‘Tide to the Moon’, which I intend to be a wide roaming record of ideas, stories, and even poems (keep listening to the end).
As I attempt to close the gap between what I believe in and want to live as true, and what I actually do in my day to day life.
I’m going to chronicle my attempts to be intentional and experience a life connected to the cycles of the Earth, the moon and maybe even the cosmos.
And to also dance with the arrhythmia, randomness, chaos of the cosmos, which I was recently reminded are just as much a part of the balance of life as regular rhythms of seasons and lunar cycles. I learned recently that the phenomenon of the polar lights, for us the Aurora Australis, are not tied to seasons on Earth as I had thought, but are caused by the sun’s solar flares on the sun and the electro magnetic fields that result, and those solar flares happen any time any which way, no rhyme or reason, that we know of anyway…
So until next time, when the moon is full, may your life be sacred.
[MUSIC]
Outro: Thanks for listening to ‘Tide to the Moon’’. If you like this podcast please rate and review us on itunes or wherever you listen, and tell other people about it. And if you have any ideas, suggestions, requests, comments or feedback, I would love to hear from you.
This podcast is made on the lands of the Gunum Willam Balluk, at the foot of Mt Macedon, 65 km north of Melbourne, Australia. This podcast is a production of Story Ground, and me, Kate Lawrence.
MUSIC
The moon tugs
Ever so gently
Like the hand of a small child
Or the wisdom of an old woman
Returning and returning and returning
Sounding with the sea
And the wombs of the world
Swinging and Swaying
Steady in the dance
Standing ground in the light.
Her role is clear
Her time is always now
Returning and returning and returning.
