The hedgerow harvest has been abundant this Autumn. Samhain traditionally marks the close of the harvesting time. It is also a threshold into a time of rest and recuperation. Days of lengthening darkness.
For the beings of the hedgerow, a rest from the exertion of growth and production and from the alchemical work of photosynthesis. The gathering in of starches for winter stores; a withdrawal of energy to the roots. Slowing metabolism, thickening cellular fluids.
For the humans that inhabit these same seasonal lands, an opportunity to stop, to step back from the busyness of work and the world and to take stock of all that we have gathered. This is equally an opportunity to take stock of our bodily, emotional and mental stores and to nourish them with warmth, food, stillness. The growing darkness supports this retreat into self, into a space of rest, replenishment and recalibration.
Samhain is often characterised as the point at which the ‘veil is thin’ between worlds; of the living and the dead, of ‘the seen and the unseen’. The time when the ancestors and spirits may draw close. But contemporary Western ocular culture – the culture of the spectacle – offers little space or credence for practices of seership and extrasensory forms of perception and the idea of interacting with unseen presences may seem a little far out for many.
Yet we all have the capacity for interospection: for turning our (sighted or other sensory forms of) gaze inwards, for sensing into our own bodies and inner worlds. And our bodies all contain elements of our own ancestral lineages and pathways. We carry traces of our ancestors within us.
The darkness invites tending to our bodies and inner worlds. And in this way it can also offer support for acknowledging and tending to those ancestral traces that are there. Through our bodies, we all have capacity for connecting with the ancestral worlds that we ourselves are a part of and carry within us. Tending inwards, we can thin the societally constructed veil of mind-body separation – and the ancestral disconnection that is a consequence for many.
Not all of the ancestral traces that we each carry may be easy to witness. Shadow work in particular offers resources for meeting such hidden aspects of ourselves with compassion, and it may be appropriate to work with support or within community.
Working within her own African-American ancestral lineage, Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry conceives of rest as a practice of reparation to those of her ancestors who never had opportunity to replenish themselves in this way; to her enslaved ancestors in particular, those who died exhausted. Through tending to her own body through rest, she offers healing and respite for the exhaustion borne by so many bodies within her ancestral lineage:
Spiritually, I began to see it as a resistance to get back the dream space stolen from my ancestors. The more I learned about what was happening to their bodies – during slavery, during plantation labour, during Jim Crow terrorism – the more I got enraged; the more I felt that this was a gift to them. This is reparations of the now. This is not waiting for reparations to be given to me by the government financially, but a spiritual reparation that’s gonna deepen me into letting my ancestors know that “they stole rest from you; they stole your dream space; they stole your autonomy, but I can recapture that dream space that was stolen to you. I’ll give that to you as a gift; it’ll be resurrected with you in the dream space.” And so I just kept sleeping with that intention.
She conceives this intentional sacred praxis of rest as part of a politics of refusal that reclaims her body and her wellbeing from the subjugation of white supremacy and of capital in the here and now and thereby creates space for ancestral healing and for ancestral connection, including seership connections within the dream realm. Although her practice is deeply informed by the traumas present within her own lineage, she is clear that rest and a politics of refusal is a necessary tool for all people in the work of disrupting and fighting against white supremacy and capitalism, because we are all impacted by grind culture and we are all interconnected in the struggle for liberation.
The deep embodiment of intentional sacred rest is also a thinning of the veil that has been drawn between people and their own humanity and their own divinity: “to be born is a miracle and what white supremacy and capitalism have done is just pulled that away from us; pulled veils over our eyes.” Treating the body as a sacred divine dwelling place is a tool to heal that disconnect, and it is this that creates space for the vision, the seership, the imagination and the ideas that will fuel the work of liberation: “it’s waiting for us in a slowed down state; it’s waiting for us in a dream; it’s waiting for us in a nap; it’s waiting for us while we’re listening to the stars and to the birds and the earth… it’s not going to come to us in an urgent, exhausted, burnt out manner”
The cultivation of any capacities of vision or dreaming, or of working beyond the veil, requires this nourishment of slowness and stillness first of all. The sanctuary of embodied being.
There are many herbs that can support the body in resting well. Sedative or hypnotic action herbs are those that often take centre stage in supporting sleep and can be invaluable at times. But all support of the body’s parasympathetic functions can help support a practice of rest; finding ways to slow down and to discharge stress, practices that enable us to switch focus from a mind-dominated to a more embodied state, replenishing vital energy with warmth and nourishment.
Nervine herbs can help to nourish and build resilience within the nervous system, aromatic kitchen herbs and gentle spices can help to bring systemic warmth, and nutritive herbs can help to restore essential reserves of vital energy, all supporting the body in resourcing itself to be able to access deeper, more sustainable rest. Foods of course also are core: anything that is warming, wholesome and easy to digest, with good oils, starches and warming spices are a deep support at this time of the seasonal cycle – slow-cooked soups and stews, squashes and root vegetables, dhals. Broths and stocks will welcome the addition of mineral rich nutritive or aromatic dried herbs gathered over the spring and summer, dried mushrooms from the autumn harvest, and fresh or dried roots: burdock, astragalus (which can be grown on these isles), ginger, dandelion and chicory in moderation (they may be roasted for the bitterness), mucilaginous mallow and homely, comforting nettle rhizome and root.
– Leo El-Qawas, Samhain 2025
Quotations from: ‘Ep 10: Rest as Resistance with Tricia Hersey’, Becoming a Good Ancestor with Layla Saad podcast, 3 Nov 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUe5EAJkYfA