Rest as Revelation

Harriet Tubman’s Dream: Rest as Revelation

There’s a story from Harriet Tubman’s life that serves to light our path through this winter season.

Tubman, who I claim as a liberation ancestor, carried a dream that moved her in loving action to set people free. But before she led others through the dark forests of Maryland toward the North Star, she first learned to walk through another kind of darkness — the soul’s deep, interior kind that comes when your body, mind and soul is under attack and your heart is in a constant state of breaking.

When Harriet was a teenager, an overseer threw a heavy metal weight that struck her head. From that moment on, she lived with what she called “sleeping spells.” Without warning, she’d drop into a state somewhere between sleep and vision — what the people around her thought of as fainting, but what Harriet came to know as communion. These were not interruptions. They were visitations. They were how God spoke to her.

One night, after an especially hard day, she fell into such a spell and dreamed that her people were free. When she awoke, she didn’t question what she’d seen. She didn’t wait for someone to confirm it or for the world to catch up. She rose up shouting, “My people are free! My people are free!”

To the eyes around her, nothing had changed. Chains were still on bodies. Laws were still unjust. But Harriet had seen something more real than the world could see. She had glimpsed the future already written in the invisible spiritual law. Her body was still enslaved, but her soul was already liberated — and she trusted that vision enough to begin living from it.

This is the power of rest. This is what winter invites us into.

When the nights lengthen and the outer world refuses to quiet, we are being called to stop our ceaseless movement and remember what Harriet knew: that the truth is not always born in the daylight. Sometimes revelation comes when we surrender to ground of silence and stillness ever waiting for us to lay down on her and rest. When we close our eyes, when the noise of the outside world fades and the inner voice of God can finally be heard, the Truth that our soul has been waiting to hear can rise.

Harriet’s dream wasn’t an escape from reality; it was the foundation of a more true reality. She woke up knowing that freedom was not a far-off goal — it was a spiritual fact. Her faith was not optimism; it was sight. She trusted the unseen so fully that she could move through swamps and night fields guided only by stars and the whisper of Spirit in her ear.

That kind of trust doesn’t come when we're under the spell of capitalism and busyness. It comes from restful soulful possibilities of slowing and listening. This kind of reality busting power quite literally comes from laying down the BS and resting on the ground of the Divine.

We live in a culture that has trained us to fear stopping or slowing down. We equate rest with laziness, silence with loss of productivity, stillness with irrelevance. But if Harriet Tubman — a woman who faced death and indignities of injustice at every turn — could rest deeply enough to receive divine guidance, maybe it’s time we unlearn and unplug from our addiction to constant motion.

Rest is not withdrawal. It’s revelation.
When we allow ourselves to be still, when we breathe slower, when we lie down and let the weight of the world fall off our shoulders, we open a space for the Divine to move in us, we create the inner conditions for liberation to begin again — not only for ourselves, but for our communities and for the whole of life.

What if, this winter, we treated this season as a spiritual practice?
What if we trusted that, like Harriet, our most radical insights might come when we slow down and turn towards winter’s wisdom?

Winter is not a punishment. It’s a rhythm. It slows us on purpose. It lengthens the dark so we can see the small lights — the stars, the candles, the glimmers of truth pointing us to loving actions. It invites us to drop below the surface noise and listen for the quiet voice that says, You are already free.

Maybe that’s the message of this whole season — that our wholeness is not waiting for spring. It’s here now, hidden in the stillness of the dark. The work is not to earn it, but to remember it. To bring ourselves back together with the Truth within us.

So, as the year draws to a close and the world keeps shouting for more — more outrage, more doing, more speed — take your cue from Harriet. Lie down. Let yourself dream.

When you rise again — and you will — rise with that same conviction burning in your bones:

My people are free. My people are free.

Somewhere in the deep of winter, may your rest become revelation.
And in that holy quiet, may you know yourself free.