Rest, Resistance, and Where We Place Our Attention

I recently watched The Last of Us with my family, and in one scene, an actor delivers this quote by Lily Tomlin:

 “Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.”

It’s stuck with me ever since.

Because if that’s true, and I believe it is, in part, then what we collectively imagine, focus on, and attend to becomes reality’s raw material. Which makes our attention not just personal, but profoundly political and spiritual.

These days, when I greet people in the pergola and ask, “What can I do for you today?” the answer is often something like: “I’m overwhelmed. I can’t sleep. The world feels like too much.”

So many of us are struggling with nervous system overload. Media saturation. The quiet, chronic grief of watching things unravel. Sleep is disrupted. People feel spiritually unmoored.

Since this next Orca Circle focuses on sleep, I’ve been journaling through some of this, and I want to offer a moment of shared breath during what feels like a relentless and overwhelming time.

I know I need that more than ever.

What Are We Paying Attention To?

Over the last few weeks in the yurt, many of us have been talking about attention; how it’s being hijacked, how it’s being commodified, and how essential it is to reclaim it.

I was taught growing up that we “vote with our dollar.”

That’s still true in some ways. But lately, I’ve come to believe that we vote with our attention even more.

In this kleptocracy (or oligarchy… or plutocracy… take your pick), attention is currency. We don’t need to spend a cent. Our clicks, our outrage, our despair are monetized. The wealthiest among us profit from our overwhelm.

And yet…Where we place our attention is still ours to choose.

Not an Escape, But a Reorientation

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, wrote about this in Man’s Search for Meaning. In one moment, after a brutal day in a concentration camp, he describes walking back through the freezing cold, starving, aching, half-alive, and seeing a stunning sunset. He turned to the man beside him and said, “How beautiful the world can be.”

Even there (especially there?) he insisted that we hold the freedom to choose where we place our attention. And that choice is a form of sacred defiance. 

I’m not writing this to suggest we ignore what’s happening. Quite the opposite.

There is real suffering unfolding as we are watching the criminalization of dissent, social services being gutted while billionaires grow richer, official agencies moving to social media while public infrastructure decays, people deported for their politics and beliefs, the slow erosion of press freedom and civil rights and the overwhelming. 

It’s a lot. And, systems of facism benefit when we are encumbered by despair. 

So here’s a question I’ve been sitting with: Can we offer some of our attention to ritual, art, nature, and dream?

These spaces don’t deny reality. They expand it. They remind us of what empire tries to erase: awe, connection, imagination, meaning.

Community, too, is resistance. Not just activism, but gathering, grieving, celebrating, healing together. 

Small acts of refusal matter. Refusing to numb out matters.  Refusing to dehumanize others matters. And refusing to stop dreaming matters. 

Dream as Medicine

Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry reminds us that “rest is not a luxury; it’s a portal.” And Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes of the Dream Maker, a wild and intuitive presence who weaves meaning through symbol and myth.

In Chinese Medicine, the Hun (魂) (sometimes called the Ethereal Soul) is the part of us that dreams, that visions, that travels beyond the veil. It is the weaver between worlds.

The Hun (魂) is a relational concept, not an individual concept.  It dreams not only for you, but for the land, the ancestors, and the unborn. It returns with grief, guidance, and stories we’ve forgotten. It is shaped by lineage, by the earth beneath our beds, by the moonlight on our skin.

When we nourish it by giving attention to sleep, it brings creative vision, bolsters our sense of purpose and belonging and offers us a space for grieving, forgiveness and change. 

When it becomes unrooted, so too, we become unrooted from the collective and can find ourselves restless and wading in disconnection or despair or a sense of being spiritually untethered. 

What the System Fears Most

Capitalism and colonialism don’t want us to dream. This system is designed to keep us switched on with it’s artificial light (messing with our melatonin), a performance culture (that keeps cortisol levels high), screens (that scramble our dopamine cycles) and the idea that stillness and silence should be feared. 

We are expected to rest like machines power down; immediately, efficiently and in isolation. But we are not machines. 

Colonialism, capitalism, and industrialism have taught us to treat rest as laziness, to treat dreams as nonsense, to treat the human body as a tool.

But sleep is not a failure of productivity. It is a return to the Earth, to the soul and to the ancestral web. 

Can We Decolonize Our Attention and Rest Like It Matters?

I absolutely believe action is necessary.

But so is dreaming. 

So is rest. 

So is choosing where to place our precious, sacred attention.

And I want to say this clearly:

I know that rest itself is not equally accessible.
Not everyone has a safe place to sleep.
Not everyone can afford to slow down.
Not everyone can close their eyes without fear.

People are working multiple jobs.

People are being detained, deported, evicted.

People are carrying the weight of white supremacy, transphobia, ableism, carceral violence.

That’s part of what makes reclaiming rest, and dreaming, and stillness, so radical. When we dare to rest, even briefly, we disrupt the systems that want us extracted, exhausted, and compliant.

If you’ve been feeling tired, anxious, ungrounded, you’re not failing. You’re responding.

Let’s make space to rest, together.

Maybe we give ourselves just ten minutes tonight.

Light a candle.
Turn off the phone.
And allow the Dream Maker to work.

Because if “reality is nothing but a collective hunch,” then perhaps dreaming, together, is how we begin to imagine a different one.

We belong to more than this moment. We belong to the wider story.