The Ministry of Naps

"The Racial Reckoning" is still going on in the culture pages at the back of newspapers.

The once-dominant media worldview of 2020-2022 that America’s highest priority is “the racial reckoning” has been memoryholed from the hard news sections in the front of newspapers. But in the soft news sections in the back that cover the slow-moving cultural bureaucracies that bestow grants, it’s still 2020. In today’s Washington Post, lets take a journey back in time to the zeitgeist of the Summer of George:

A Colorado Springs community gathered one summer morning — to take a nap

By Anumita Kaur

July 17, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

About 70 people gathered Saturday morning at a community center in the Hillside neighborhood of Colorado Springs. They greeted one another, sipped tea and found a seat in the airy, white room — then everyone lay down and closed their eyes.

It was a giant community nap….

Colorado Springs resident and Pikes Peak Region Poet Laureate Ashley Cornelius organized the community nap after receiving a $7,500 Arts in Society grant, a fund supporting art projects focused on social issues in Colorado. She purchased yoga mats, blankets, tea blends and notebooks for attendees, and she paid facilitators to lead participants through a meditation and sound bath — all to encourage fellow residents in the historically Black neighborhood of Hillside to do one thing: rest — and not feel bad about it. People don’t rest enough, Cornelius said, particularly people of color.

“We’re so inundated with hustle and grind culture — to do more, and be excellent, all the time. I have personally felt so much guilt and shame about taking a break or resting, or taking [paid time off],” Cornelius said.

When people do finally rest, it’s often with the intention of being able to do more work, she said.

“Rest is the destination for this event,” Cornelius said. “Rest is for us. It’s our birthright, it’s our inheritance, and we have to use it for our mental health, for our physical health. Rest is just as important, if not more, than our productivity.”

… Some communities of color are sleeping even less: About 46 percent of Black adults do not get enough sleep, and nearly half of Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander adults are clocking less than seven hours, according to the CDC. …

Miller, a high school teacher in Colorado Springs, saw Cornelius’s event promoted online. She was relaxing during her school district’s summer break, but she immediately knew she had to go.

“I love napping. It sounded right up my alley,” Miller said. “I registered as quickly as I could.”

… Saturday’s community nap was inspired by the work of Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry and self-anointed Nap Bishop, Cornelius said. Hersey’s work promotes that “rest is resistance” — opposition to the notion that people must be productive at all costs. Hersey’s work illuminates how rest comes in many forms, Cornelius added. This can mean napping, she said, but it can also mean sitting in the bathroom longer than you need to, or finding two minutes to step away from work and breathe.