I’ll start with a statement that feels a little strange, perhaps rebellious, and definitely anti-capitalist: there is no shame in rest.
This rings especially true in feminist spaces where we’re constantly carrying something: a cause, a fight, a conversation, a hashtag. Rest is the fuel that keeps the feminist movement, and us, deep inside it, alive.
I keep returning to a dream Regina, an 80-year old feminist who once worked at the World bank, shared with us: ‘I wanted to plan something like this for my generation of feminists. A gathering where we didn’t come to strategize and fundraise, or resist. Where we just…exist. It never happened.’
Like many feminist dreams, the urgency of the work swallowed the softness that sustains it. But here we are, eighteen years later, doing it.
Women, especially feminists, are always trying to be something. To advocate for something. To fight something. To undo something. And while all of that matters deeply, sometimes we forget that the body carrying the work is also part of the work. Feminism has always been about liberation. But what does liberation mean if your mind, your spirit, and your nervous system never experience it?
And why is that personal, restful liberation equated with idleness and laziness?
I’ve always known that rest is not the absence of activity. But at this retreat, I experienced rest in its many forms.
I found rest in the company of women, separated by language, culture, personalities but united by the singular, West African feminist experience. In the fun but stimulating conversations that expanded my mind. In the unhurried walks through art galleries, and the giggly selfies with African art pieces(that looked suspiciously like our aunties). In learning aromatherapy and comparing oil scents together. In laughing during makeup sessions that spoke to the little girl in all of us. In stretching into ourselves through Yoga. In the intentionality of being.
The Rooted and Woven Retreat was a deliberate pause to look back at the past, what worked, what didn’t. It was a grounding in the present, to breathe, to notice ourselves. It was a hopeful look at the future, at possibilities that only become visible when the mind is not drowning.
Rest is creating memories you can return to at 80. And it is also giving your 80-year-old self something beautiful to re-live.
More than ever, I’ve come to know this: the feminist movement cannot thrive on exhaustion, and cannot flourish on sacrifice alone. Rest is revolutionary. It is our resistance.
A rested feminist is an unstoppable feminist.
Written by Eniola Diadem Omotola
