The Healing Power of Stillness: Why Rest Restores the Heart and Rekindles Purpose
What if rest isn’t an ending…but the quiet beginning of everything that matters?
Now to be Still and Rest
P H B Lyon
Now to be still and rest, while the heart remembers
All that is learned and loved in the days of long past,
To stoop and warm our hands at the fallen embers,
Glad to have come to the long way’s end at last.
Now to awake, and feel no regret at waking,
Knowing the shadowy days are white again,
To draw our curtains and watch the slow dawn breaking
Silver and grey on English field and lane.
Now to fulfil our dreams, in woods and meadows
Treading the well-loved paths – to pause and cry
‘So, even so I remember it’ – seeing the shadows
Weave on the distant hills their tapestry.
Now to rejoice in children and join their laughter,
Tuning our hearts once more to the fairy strain,
To hear our names on voices we love, and after
Turn with a smile to sleep and our dream again.
Then – with a new-born strength, the sweet rest over,
Gladly to follow the great white road once more,
To work with a song on our lips and the heart of a lover,
Building a city of peace on the wastes of war.
Reflection
P. H. B. Lyon’s poem is a gentle reminder that rest is not idleness but a sacred pause where memory, gratitude, and renewal quietly take root. Each stanza invites us into a different dimension of rest: remembering, awakening, returning to nature, reconnecting with joy, and finally rising again with new strength.
Rest becomes a circle, not a stop. We step back, breathe, reflect — and only then are we ready to step forward with clarity and love. The poem shows that true rest is not just physical; it is emotional alignment, spiritual re-centering, and an honoring of all we’ve lived through.
Perhaps the most powerful idea here is that rest allows us to remember who we are before the world told us to hurry.
Where in your life do you most need stillness right now — and what might it restore in you if you allowed it space?