Fallow Times﻿

Today the Italian Mama used a word I hadn’t thought of in a while: fallow. 

During fallow times, you feel drained, empty, unproductive, and unsettled. Something’s supposed to be happening but isn’t. Your life feels like it’s in a bizarre kind of crop rotation, and it’s your turn for the soil of your life to sit there and yield nothing. 

Nothing. Unstructured and nonproductive. No seeds. No growth. Nothing. 

Nothing! How wasteful! How boring and sad!

But I remember the point of crop rotation and fallow fields: replenishing nutrients, eradicating pathogens, and rebuilding the soil structure. 

If every season (or hour, day, week, month) were productive and ripe and bountiful, we’d suffer inevitable erosion.

Fallow times allow for replenishment, so when they come (and they will), we’ll stretch out in the wide field of our heart and allow the warm sun, the drenching rains, and the soft winds to replenish what’s been overused and over productive. 

What’s happening is the nothing we need. 


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