My introduction to Tricia Hersey is Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. Published in 2022, this came to my attention via Carmen with her excellent recentMy introduction to Tricia Hersey is Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. Published in 2022, this came to my attention via Carmen with her excellent recent review. I'd been watching YouTube videos in which women chronicle their experiences living in their cars and without referring to Hersey or the Nap Ministry, one of the Black "car lifers" presented Hersey's thesis: rest is a form of resistance against the machine-level pace of our culture and a key to surviving poverty, exhaustion, white supremacy and capitalism with our body and mind intact.
-- When I started resting to save my life and connect with my Ancestors, I was a poor, Black, queer woman in graduate school on student loans with thousands of dollars in debt. I had been unemployed and underemployed since I was a full-time student worker in an archive library on campus barely making $12 an hour for a few hours weekly. I was also working for free as part of an internship for my studies while taking a full load of classes and caring for a six-year-old child. I am and was a first-generation adult graduate student with a child and a husband who was working fifty-plus hours a week to pay our rent while I studied. Once I finished my program, I couldn't find work in my field even after going on countless interviews. I remember sitting on my side of my bed crying because I had negative $25 in my bank account, no car and no savings. This is not a movement created by a person speaking about rest from some sort of position of privilege outside of being traumatized from capitalism and white supremacy. I'm telling you it's possible because I am the poster child and witness. Rest saved my life.
-- I watched my father get up every morning at four a.m. He would drag himself out of bed to sit at the kitchen table to read three newspapers, study his Bible and pray silently. He would do this for almost two hours before he needed to leave for work at six. I remember asking, "Why do you get up so early when you don't have to be at work until later?" He replied, "I want to have a few moments in the day that belong to just me before I clock in."
-- Resting can look like:
1. Closing your eyes for ten minutes. 2. A longer shower in silence. 3. Meditating on the couch for twenty minutes. 4. Daydreaming by staring out of a window. 5. Sipping warm tea before bed in the dark. 6. Slow dancing with yourself to slow music. 7. Experiencing a Sound Bath or other sound healing. 8. A Sun Salutation. 9. A twenty-minute timed nap. 10. Praying. 11. Crafting a small altar for your home. 12. A long, warm bath. 13. Taking regular breaks from social media. 14. Not immediately responding to texts and emails. 15. Deep listening to a full music album. 16. A meditative walk in nature. 17. Knitting, crocheting, sewing, and quilting. 18. Playing a musical instrument. 19. Deep eye contact. 20. Laughing intensely.
-- The concept of filling up your cup first, so you can have enough in it to pour to others feel off balance. It reeks of capitalist language that is now a part of our daily mantras. Language like "I will sleep when I am dead," "Rise and grind," "While they sleep, I grind," "If it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense," "Wake up and hustle," and many more. The cup metaphor also is most often geared toward women, who, because of patriarchy and sexism, carry the burden of labor. Marginalized women, specifically Black and Latina women, make up the largest group of laborers in a capitalist system. Our labor history historically has been used to make the lives of white women less hectic and more relaxed. So when I hear and see this "filling your cup" language repeated on memes on social media and in the larger wellness community, I realize that our view of rest is still burdened with the lies of grind culture. I propose that the cups all be broken into little pieces, and we replace pouring with resting and connecting with our bodies in a way that is centered on experimentation and repair. I don't want to pour anymore.
One of Hersey's contributions is being an advocate for rest. Everywhere we turn, there are apostles for productivity: growing faster, advancing further, earning more, boosting your numbers. Slowing down, taking a breather, or daydreaming are practically heretical. The very thought of quitting seems hateful to most westerners. It makes me wonder who's benefiting from these narratives. Not people who are content with what they have. I was relieved to find reinforcement here that I'm already doing a few things on Hersey's list: taking long showers, a half hour nap after lunch on workdays and taking a walk when I get home.
Hersey includes a few personal anecdotes and I would've liked much more of that. Most of this manifesto is repetitive, with words like "grind culture," "side hustle," "white supremacy" or "capitalism" repeated over and over and over. I would've preferred a book that included interviews with social scientists, teachers, caregivers and others discussing how they burned out, how they benefited from rest and what that looked like for them. This manifesto is a good starting point, but my recommendation is to put your $13 toward rest and instead of buying this ebook, search Tricia Hersey on Google or YouTube....more
As a junior high school student in the 1980s, I was obsessed with the unexplained. My reading habits looked like Fox Mulder's on The X-Files. Instead As a junior high school student in the 1980s, I was obsessed with the unexplained. My reading habits looked like Fox Mulder's on The X-Files. Instead of cars, sports or blondes, what I wanted in a TV show was Robert Stack briefing me on the latest in ghosts, lake monsters or UFOs on the NBC series Unsolved Mysteries. It's been that long since a book on the paranormal intrigued me and I was primed for a deep dive into those waters using the latest technology, investigative techniques and perspectives. Published in 2010, Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare and UFOs by Mark Pilkington was worth the wait.
A young journalist from Norfolk, England specializing in the paranormal, Pilkington democratically focuses his book on case histories of the more compelling UFO incidents of recent years, particularly ones with the fingerprints of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) on them, and also inserts himself into the mystery, as he and producer John Lundberg attend the Laughlin UFO Convention in Nevada in a quest to interview Richard Doty, an infamous AFOSI agent, retired, responsible for running counterintelligence operations among ufologists during his enigmatic career, leaking information both true and false to those who believe the truth is out there.
Pilkington, who chaired the Norfolk UFO Society in his university days and constructed crop circles in England, is closest in belief to Dana Scully on The X-Files, a cynic who has seen some weird shit. He begins the book relating his own UFO sighting in July 1995 near Yosemite National Park. Pilkington is a reporter, far from a true believer in extraterrestrial visitors or the conspiracy theories thrown around at UFO conventions, whose attendance has been on the wane since Fox cancelled The X-Files in 2002. Less interested in whether we're being visited and if the government knows all about it, Pilkington is fascinated by the UFO myth, who originated it, and why.
For me the really interesting part was that Doty and Bennewitz were the conduits, if not the source, for much of the UFO mythology that had emerged since the early 1980s. Stories about crashed UFOs, US government pacts with nasty ETs, alien harvesting of cattle and manipulation of human DNA, which had gained in potency and authenticity as they were retold through countless books, articles, films and TV documentaries. This was the forge of late-twentieth century folklore, the heart of America's Cold War dreaming and the world in which John and I, with our crop circle work, were already a small part.
"Doty" is Richard C. Doty, special agent for AFOSI stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico during the late '70s and early '80s. Doty's counterintelligence work--helping safeguard some of the most valuable secrets in the U.S. Air Force--involved lying to the public about UFOs, but lying in ways contrary to how many of the true believers suspect. "Bennewitz" is Paul Bennewitz, an engineer who developed instruments for the USAF near Kirtland. Bennewitz's UFO sightings and investigation into the phenomena were encouraged by special agent Doty, who "ran" Bennewitz and fed him information--some good, some bad--credited with slowly driving the engineer insane.
Briefly examining UFO incidents from the flying saucer flyovers of Washington D.C. in the summer of 1952 to an outbreak that occurred over in Iran in the winter of 2004 in provinces where Iran's nuclear facilities just so happen to be based, Pilkington doesn't see the handiwork of alien visitors in these incidents as much as he does someone like a Richard Doty in the FBI, CIA or NSA whose tools range from radar spoofing to forged documents to disinformation. Pilkington's thesis is that these events resemble counterintelligence operations designed to either protect U.S. military secrets or to neutralize adversaries both foreign and domestic who seek to expose those secrets.
In Laughlin, Pilkington and Lundberg meet Bill Ryan, the latest superstar of the UFO community, a personal development trainer who stumbled on an email group frequented by scientists, military personnel and private citizens with an interest in UFOs. Bill becomes the public conduit for the posts of "Request Anonymous", a user whose timed releases expose an incredible story: the Roswell crash of 1947 really happened, a surviving extraterrestrial biological entity named EBE 1 was kept at Los Alamos Laboratories and when its fellow EBEs arrived to retrieve it, twelve Earth ambassadors went away with them. The alien planet, located 38 light years away, is called Serpo.
"I'm not trying to browbeat anyone into believing this," explained Bill, "only to consider it as a possibility, but I think a simple hoax or prank can be absolutely ruled out. It's too complex for that, and there's too much circumstantial corroboration. Misinformation falls into the same category--that would mean it's all false. But it could be disinformation. That means part truth, part fiction. And the fiction part could be as little as 5 per cent for the entire story to be thrown off-kilter."
No stranger to the public eye or discussing UFOs since his retirement, Richard Doty responds to Pilkington and Lundberg's email and agrees to meet the Brits in Laughlin to be interviewed. Looking more like a civil servant than an international man of mystery, Doty has dinner with the investigators and puts them at ease immediately, regaling them with stories of Area 51, where Doty claims he worked. He drops a bombshell: ETs have been here, the US government knows about them and has the alien technology to prove it, some of which Doty has handled. Pilkington believes that Doty believes what he's saying, but that the bigger mystery is why he's volunteering it.
During the week Pilkington and Lundberg spend with him in Laughlin, Doty dismisses ninety percent of the UFO lore exchanged at conferences like this, such as alien abductions. He's dismissive of Bill Ryan, but not the bombshell Request Anonymous report Ryan is broadcasting. Doty sticks to what Pilkington corroborates with scientific and military personnel who speak to him about the UFO phenomenon to be a simple, core story: There are ETS, they came here once or a few times, we kept two in captivity and kept some of their technology, and the Serpo team left with them in 1965.
Pilkington asks Doty why, if the government knows the truth about UFOs, they're still covering it up. Doty offers that the fear of unlimited free energy scares the Powers That Be. Pilkington doesn't buy it, replying that even free energy would be metered to pay for its infrastructure. Doty responds, "I like you guys. You're smart." He shares documents and offers to secure financing for their UFO documentary. Doty tantalizes the boys with access but Pilkington is aware he's not the first journalist to be offered such "cooperation" from the military only to be left out to dry. Is it to keep the UFO myth going until the next counterintelligence operation, or part of a massive public relations plan?
A neurophysiologist named Kit Green who worked at the Office for Science and Technology at the CIA, where he was a "keeper of the weird" and became interested in UFOs echoes the core story Richard Doty offered and tells Pilkington, "If you were to give them the core story right off the bat, they'd get sick, so you do it slowly over ten or twenty years. You put out a bunch of movies, a bunch of books, a bunch of stories, a bunch of Internet memes about all the crazy stuff that we've seen recently in Serpo. Then one day you say, 'Hey, all that stuff is nonsense, relax, it's not that bad, you don't have to worry, the reality is this'--and then you give them the real story."
Rather than write a wide-eyed expose of the weird with a sprinkle of his own pet theories, or simply set out to debunk UFOs ad hoc, Mark Pilkington achieves a terrific credibility with Mirage Men. He's been interested in UFOs most of his life, faked crop circles (for those who still believe crop circles to be alien artwork, anyway) and seen a UFO while changing a flat tire in Nevada, but as a journalist and a rationalist, retains a healthy skepticism for any stories about extraterrestrial visitors. His writing has real finesse, a dash of color and wit that kept me turning the pages without treating his subject matter like a big joke.
The UFOs are tricksters, as are Rick and all the others like him. In traditional cultures it was the trickster's role not just to deceive, but to drive invention and science, just as UFOs always appear to possess technologies that lie around the corner from our own. Tricksters taught the spider to make her web and humans to make nets, traps and hooks; it was also common for tricksters to become caught in their own traps. Does Rick really believe that ETs have been here? All I can say is that I hope so. But, whether or not Rick believes, millions of others do, and some of them hold positions of considerable influence.
The book is the perfect length, offering just the right amount of case history into the UFO phenomenon--beginning with the reports of airships in the U.S. of the 1890s and heating up again in Europe in 1942 when British and American pilots reported "the thing" or "foo fighters" following their planes--and ending before too many of these stories led me down a rabbit hole of possibility, paranoia and confusion. Transitioning between the historical record and his own bizarre experiences in Laughlin or Roswell, Pilkington keeps the book fresh and exciting and does offer something of a potent thesis for those hungry for The Truth....more
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