Episode 13: Beauty Rest
Greetings Beloveds,
I’m so glad to be back with you! November is a special month for us here at the Fish Sandwich Heaven Podcast! Exactly one year ago, we started on this podcasting journey and I’m so thankful to each of you for listening thus far.
I’ve learned a lot over this last year. And I'm excited about what’s coming up in this next one. Many years ago, I had the idea of a Black Queer Feminist Socialist Mr. Rogers program, and Fish Sandwich Heaven is slowly evolving into that. So we’re going to have interviews at the top of the year with the people in our neighborhood.
We’re also going to be moving to a biweekly release schedule. Meaning, every OTHER week.
So much love to The Rev. Porsha Williams Gates and her team at Porshanality Media for producing and encouraging this podcast.
Another thing that I want to remind you is that if you want to drop a line, you’re welcome to head to the fishsandwichheaven.com/contact page.
At the Chopping Board
I am a human being with human needs.
I am not meant to “rise and grind.”
It is not my fault if I can’t get the rest I need.
I am deserving of a family, a group of friends, a community, a world that allows me to tap in and out as I’m able.
Our Fish Sandwich
Today’s text comes from Psalm 4:1-8 in the NRSV.
1 Answer me when I call, O God of my right!
You gave me room when I was in distress.
Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer.
2 How long, you people, shall my honor suffer shame?
How long will you love vain words, and seek after lies?Selah
3 But know that the Lord has set apart the faithful for himself;
the Lord hears when I call to him.
4 When you are disturbed,do not sin;
ponder it on your beds, and be silent.Selah
5 Offer right sacrifices,
and put your trust in the Lord.
6 There are many who say, “O that we might see some good!
Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord!”
7 You have put gladness in my heart
more than when their grain and wine abound.
8 I will both lie down and sleep in peace;
for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.
Do you know how we got the weekend? We didn’t always have one. In 1886, Unions organized a strike for the 8 hour work day. Their slogan was, “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.” When you get a chance, research the HayMarket Riots. Prior to the 8 hour work day, workers in factories would easily work 10 to twelve hour days. There were more dangerous accidents. Even for the night owl, a 60 hour work week in a factory with heavy machinery is deadly.
The people who organized these actions had a radical idea: As human beings, we have the right to self-determine how we spend our time. We are more than capital, we are on this earth to do more than just pay bills and make the boss rich. Of course, a country founded on stolen land and stolen labor had to learn that you can’t force people to work from can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. And this lesson is still being learned.
In fact, Amazon workers in New York are moving towards forming a union, which has the capacity to impact thousands of employees at the Staten Island location. Among their demands are options for medical and other kinds of leave, better wages, longer breaks.
It took years for U.S. Federal regulations to even address the concerns of workers. And I think we can all imagine why it took so long for the United States to conceptualize workers as a class of human beings who deserved rights. A story for another day.
The revised Fair Labor Standards Act arrived around 1940, which limited the workweek to 40 hours. Factories could no longer expect workers to drive themselves to the point of exhaustion. In theory.
Today, the gig economy renders much of that protection unusable. Gig workers like Uber drivers, instacart shoppers, tipped workers or domestic workers can work way more than 40 hours. Not because they want to, but because you have to.Even worse, there are horror stories about Instacart users, for example, luring shoppers into trips with big tips, only to cancel the tips after the order has been delivered.
I’m still working out what I believe about hell, but I'll tell you what. You do something like THAT and that’s where you going. Cuz you made hell for someone else. Therefore, boom.
Here’s what I want to tell you right now.
It’s okay to be tired. Of working, of the news, of political corruption, of loneliness, of environmental distress. No one is supposed to live like this. And perhaps you may feel like I do, where you are tired of repeating yourself and looking for something more sustainable.
One of the reasons it took so long for me to come back to another season is, baby, Ya girl is TIRED. I’ve done everything to manage my calendar and my schedule. I did the bullet journal. The google calendar. The wake up early and stretch. The routine of running during the week. And while those things have added value to my life, it does not cancel out the massive monsters sitting outside of my bedroom door.
It does not end imperialism.
It does not un-melt glaciers.
It does not remove the microphones from homophobes or transphobes.
Maintaining my own rituals only helps me ATTEMPT to regulate my own body; it does not change my environment.
There is no THING I can do to be unstressed. The problem is not me. It is not ME. And as much as I try to maintain healthy habits for MY heart, mind and body (not some prescribed thing some fitness influencer told me to do), I’m still DRAINED.
It’s almost like, living in a pandemic is… not how humans are designed to live.
Like, have we forgotten we are living under a public health crisis? Jesus the Doctor Christ!
Even worse, the very people demanding MORE of your time and energy will tell you, “YOU need to do self care.” ALL While they add more work to your plate. If you can’t say amen, say ouch.
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will.
I don’t know about you, but my day looks more like 3 hours of sleep, 4 hours of work, 5 hours of staring at the ceiling and convincing myself I am not in the twilight zone, and then I don’t know where the other 12 hours go.
You also don’t have to be experiencing the worst loss to be emotionally exhausted. Losing prom, your retirement party, and not being able to take communion are small, but significant, tears in the fabric of our heart. And eventually enough tears add up and make holes.
These are things we ponder on our beds.
And yet, I believe if God is a useful god, then God at LEAST hears our prayers.
“Answer me when I call, O God!”
“Be Gracious to me, and hear my prayer!”
Hello!
There is no VIP section in heaven for people who took punishment on earth like soldiers. There is no special gold trophy for those who went through life without complaining. On the contrary.
Even in this Psalmist’s confident plea, we learn that God “gave them room when they were in distress.” God has made space, made room, so that this psalmist can experience grace. God responds to our cries not with hushes, but with open ears and action. God will make room where there was none before. Just for you. I like to believe that God defies the laws of physics to do this. Whereas in our world, you have to take room from someone else to make room, in God’s ways, God adds to the cosmic square footage. God doesn’t have to take from someone else to give to you.
We are often taught, especially as Christians, to pray UMBLE prayers. We are often discouraged from telling God the truth. But let me tell you something, if God is as big as we say God is, God already knows when you’re being fake in your prayers.
I would rather cuss you out to your face than for you to hear second hand from somebody else.
Surely, pressing God is enough to disturb your sleep. After all, Why should I have to keep reminding God that I need help? Since you got your degree, and you know everything!
When (not if) you are disturbed, do not sin, ponder it on your beds, and be silent.
Had I read this 2 years ago, I would have missed it. But since about March 2020, I have been nowhere more than my bed. I take phone calls there, read there, eat there, watch shows there, and I sleep there. I am currently recording IN My bed. I’ve been to birthday parties, church, conferences, concerts, all from my room. So much so that I had to invest in a new mattress because the 15 year old bed that I had was hurting my back.
After some research, I realized It’s not just me looking for another mattress. The New York Times reported an apparent boom in Mattress sales since last April. The marketing officer at Avocado, a mattress manufacturer, said, “People are putting more money into the home and other things that make them feel good.”
And there are also upticks in substance use. Alcohol and hard drugs are being consumed more because people are desperate for comfort. If you are struggling with substance abuse right now, please know that you are not alone and you’re not imagining just how much LOUDER the cravings can be.
A photo of candace in her Black Old Navy Onesie and elephant slippers in the mirror.
And it’s happening across many industries. A friend was just remarking to me the other day that she couldn't find a simple black dress for an interview, but there was a WHOLE BUNCH of sweatpants and athleisure. And Imma just be real, I LIVE in this one piece spandex number I got from old navy. I’ll put a picture on the site so you can see how magical it is.
People are desperate for comfort. For something that will make them well, because we know we are not.
Desperate for comfort, against our own well being.
If human beings do not sleep for the appropriate amount of time, we are likely to be the worst versions of ourselves.
When you are disturbed, do not sin, ponder it on your beds, and be silent.
The best way to describe this sense is through an iconic Angela Bassett performance in American Dream: The Jackson 5 Story. Playing the role of Katherine Jackson, the mom of the musical Jackson clan, she demonstrates how pondering your disturbances in your bed can keep you from sinning. Here, I want to define “sin” as something that separates you from community. Something that endangers you and the people around you. And Joseph Jackson was about to sin.
Joseph Jackson was a notoriously abusive father. In multiple accounts, his children spoke to how he diminished their humanity. In one scene in the movie, Joseph finds a wet towel in the pool, and gets ready to wake the guilty child up for what we can infer will be a beating.
Katherine pleads, “no more beatings, Joseph. No more.” Joseph is enraged, he can’t see past his anger and his madness. It probably has little to do with the towel and more to do with unprocessed trauma that HE has. He insists, “this is between me and the boys.”
Katherine won’t let up. She says “the boys are young men now. What are you gonna do, ask them to get a switch so you can beat them? Go to bed Joseph. GO to bed.”
Sometimes we need someone to intervene and get us to tap out, because if we keep going? We’re going to hurt ourselves or someone else.
Go to bed.
When you are disturbed, do not sin, ponder it on your beds, and be silent.
How many people in this world would be safer if their bullies stopped targeting them? If they, in some sense, went to bed. Not just physical sleep. I’m talking about the sense of reflection that is LOUD in this verse.
Don’t just go to bed.
Do not sin. Ponder it on your beds. Be silent.
How many lives would be saved if this were an instinct we cultivated? How many relationships and families would be well, if instead of reacting cruelly or out of spite, we took the time to “ponder on our beds, and be silent?”
The evil of this world is that we do not often have the resources to ponder on our beds.
So many of us do not have the luxury of 8 hours of rest, eight hours for work, and eight hours for what we will.
And that is not to excuse manipulative, cruel, toxic, or even abusive behavior. It is to admit that until people have the room in their day to look at themselves in the mirror and evaluate their behavior, they will continue to go through the motions. Because this is the default of the world. It takes time and energy to set the world right-side up. Time and energy that most people do not have.
The sad part is that, there are people who DO have this kind of time and energy, but they refuse to interrogate their behaviors. Because it gets them a paycheck. Help us holy ghost. We STUCK!
I WILL both lie down and sleep in peace.
The Psalms, like any sacred text, were first repeated and rehearsed orally. It takes years for something to be written down; and in the meantime, people are talking about it, sharing this wisdom at the dinner table, singing it as worship.
What if, given this communal context, the phrase was, “we will BOTH lie down in sleep in peace.” OR. We will ALL lie down and sleep in peace?
I say this because, in the last few years, people have commodified what it means to practice self care. I don’t want to do away with the idea of self care because Audre Lorde theorized on this matter as a Black lesbian mother and cancer patient. It MEANS something for someone like Audre Lorde to talk about self care as something beyond self indulgence and something more like a radical act.
But self care is not something Target or Walmart invented. Even though they’ll try to sell it to you like that! Audre Lorde sat under the weight of multiple oppressive forces, which positioned her to see holistic, radical self-care as a necessary project for her survival and the survival of others like her.
But if you scroll through the #selfcare hashtag, you will not get anything close to what Audre Lorde was desperately gesturing towards.
Bath bombs. Manicures. New shoes. OKAY! Things I like and use!
But then you’ll find things like Luxury goods and services, created by Black and Brown workers who will never be able to enjoy the very goods and services they themselves worked on. Because that’s the definition of luxury. And then you’ll see nice vacations in the middle of a pandemic to brown countries where they don't have respirators, vaccines, or adequate hospital beds to deal with U.S. American tourism…
But if I can paraphrase the Grinch, self-care isn’t something you buy in a store. It’s not something you can buy at all. And as long as self care is a good to purchase on the market, it will never be wholly accessible to Black people, queer people, trans people, disabled people, poor people, undocumented people, elders, children and so many others. And I cannot imagine what Lorde would have to say about that.
Instead of saying “Black people deserve luxury,” would it hurt us to say, “Black people deserve good things?” What does it do for us to run after luxury, as long as luxury is defined as a highly priced good that is out of reach of most average people?
You deserve good and healing and delicious things. But guess what, everyone does? There is nothing that you do that makes you more or less deserving than someone else.
So you may be sitting here wondering, Well, Miss Candace, how is it that the psalmist ends this passage with the confidence that they will eventually go to bed in safety?
Nature always has an answer.
I saw a video of a caterpillar swarm. And apparently, this is a way that caterpillars travel that is much more efficient than any other transportation. They basically glob on to each other, forming something like a rolling plate of caterpillars. And so they move much quicker and they stay together in doing so. If they all marched single file or in military formation, it would take much longer for them to get where they were going. They would be too spread out. The smaller or weaker ones might get left behind. Or even eaten by predators.
But instead, they know that their rest is in each other. And so in the video, you see them take turns with their bodies. Sometimes you’re on the upper layer and you're letting those on the ground propel you, and other times you’re on the lower layer and you’re propelling others. But there’s space for recovery and pacing that makes it so they don’t have to stop altogether as a unit.
And so the movement continues.
They can tap in and out of the movement at a pace that is sustainable individually and collectively.
The Lorde gave me this question that I want to leave with you.
How can the caterpillar become the butterfly if it does not first swarm with its community first?
How can we be the most creative, loving, well, whole, imaginative, curious and compassionate versions of ourselves as God has called us to be, if we do not first take rest in the people around us?
If you are the caterpillar on the lower layer, and everyone is using you to take THEIR rest, your time to rest is coming, thus saith the lord. Just you wait.
If you are the caterpillar on the upper layer, and you’re always sucking up everybody else’s labor, your time to work is coming, thus saith the Lord. Just you wait.
I can hear the voice of the late Stanley Manning during the Concord presentation of Handel’s Messiah reminding us of what God promised.
Every valley shall be exalted. And EVERY mountain and hill made low.
I believe God’s gonna straighten some things out. Set some things in order. Don’t nobody need to be in the upper layer every time, or in the lower layer every time.
God’s desire is for your health and wellness. And not at the expense of anyone else. When God created this world, God gave us everything we need to live well. God will make us lie down in safety. Rest on God. Take it to the Lord in prayer. Ponder it on your bed. You’ve already given more hours to the day than is humanly possible.
We WILL ALL lie down and sleep in peace.
I believe it, even when I don’t see it.
May it be so.
Our To Go Bag
Who are the people in your swarm? Are there people who are always draining you without any care? Are there people you call on often without checking in about their capacity? Take some time to journal about these dynamics. Reflection is the action. Building self-awareness about our ecosystems helps us to orient ourselves.