Fallow

Fallow Etymology: to fold hence to turn

On the heels of the summer harvest, we turn now to the fallow time of year.  Dry leaves on the ground, empty muddy fields, days of cold and darkness. Like the empty fields, there are times in our lives that feel fallow.  We are after all a part of same rhythm of the life’s waxing and waning. All that was starts to fall away, color, flowing streams, long days. We might seek comfort by the fires, the golden inside lights, the warming foods.  But in fallow the consolations can be bittersweet if at all. 

There is in this turning a first shock of loss when it seems as if we might not be changed.  But then there follows the long slow integration of loss through layers of grief.  There is so much to let go of and nothing new yet to hold onto. This grief strands us in a foreign land where no thing offers the comfort we long for. 

Folding back into ourselves, we are being asked to give in, give up, and allow what we have not asked for, planned for, anticipated.  The unimaginable is happening.  Pulled away from solid ground, I feel myself falling, pulled out to sea, disinherited.

Because what is coming but is not yet cannot be self-willed, we will feel lost, overwhelmed, and childlike again. It can feel as if I have lost my voice; to use it would be like speaking into the wind.  

I hope the fallow time will turn again into growth but do not know when and cannot make this happen.  Like the seeds in winter field laying still and alone, what is being held in the dark soil is already readying itself for splendor.  I glimpse this but do not know it yet. The seed that cannot imagine itself outside of its shell, its potential for roots, sap, and tendons, hidden except for the faintest pulse felt in a heart cell.  

When it comes again, the light will call forth in each seed something new and wild through its own breaking open, through, and forth.  May this fallow field push forth through me something completely new, God given, and wild, the unfolding of my life.  May it be the most creative.