Fallow soils

It has been 72 days since my last yarn shop day, though of course it doesn’t actually *feel* that long ago when you factor in all the work that needed to be done to take inventory, box things up, and move out of the retail space I once called my second home. My days, since then, have been a pretty steady stream of… nothing. I mean, not nothing nothing, but hardly the summer full of adventures I envisioned when I first made this decision.

Rather, I have found myself a lot of days just going through the motions. Putting one foot forward, then the next, trudging along day after day while riding a roller coaster of emotions that comes with grieving your former life that just didn’t work out the way you wanted it to. I knew, going into this, that the adjustment would be hard. I’ve always worked an ‘outside the home’ job, and I knew being home all the time, now, would be rough. But I imagined I would suddenly bloom with creativity in other ways, like dead-heading flowers in the garden and cutting away the decaying blooms to make room for new growth.

Yesterday, I picked up The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad because I find myself looking for some depth to my days, my morning journal practice, and just some new ways to think through this current chapter of my life. This morning, I sat down with my coffee and my journal to do my morning pages, and then read the first out of one hundred essays, hoping it would, at the least, inspire a little paragraph to reflect.

Friends – it inspired whole pages of writing (a rare feat when most days I feel like I struggle to write a full single page) plus this post, and I realized that I am thinking of this chapter of my life entirely wrong and, dare I say, too small.

I have been trying to trim away the old to make room for the new, but nothing seems to grow. I can’t seem to make headway on anything right now. I have barely touched my knitting needles, to the point where I’m worried that I’m done done with that creative outlet. I’m not making a lot of progress in my other creative pursuits, either. I feel stuck, barren of creativity. And today, this very morning as I journaled, it struck me: I’m in a fallow soils period.

Often I’ve argued that we, as a society, were not meant to work year-round. Our ancestors had periods of productivity as they brought forth the crops and lambs, periods of harvest and slaughter, and periods of rest and wintering. We have generation after generation of this cycle in our DNA. But in all of this pondering, I have completely forgotten about the fact that soils have not just winter periods but outright fallow periods, where they’re left to rest for a year or more to replenish, recharge, control pests, etc.

I have been approaching this chapter of my life all wrong. I have been here, day in and day out, expecting a short few weeks of a break would be enough to oust the burnout. When I closed my shop, I explained to everyone that I would be taking a short break over the summer to rest and recharge – and assumed it would be over quicker than that – but as each week goes by and I feel barely any different and I begin to panic as I wonder where my drive has run off to, whether it will ever return, and whether I’ve just lied to everyone with the promise of my return.

I have spent over 4 years straight being in a period of creative production and harvest, bringing forth ideas and events and making thing after thing. I see it so clearly now that my creative “fields” became depleted beyond quick repair. I see, now, that this period of deterioration began long before I made the decision to close my shop and that my attempts to amend my soils at that time, in attempt to carry on as usual, were just poor band-aids to the wider scope of issues. And, just like my garden soils, this isn’t something that can be quickly fixed with a bag of fertilizer. These are issues that are remedied with an extended season of fallowness i.e. deep rest, not forcing things or beating myself up because I’m not living up to the capitalistic expectation of “productivity.”

This chapter of my life is a period of transition, yes, but not in the way I thought it would be. I’m not failing in my pursuit of rest – I need to embrace it more fully, completely, and really nestle myself into the earthy soils of my life, let moss begin to form, let the weeds take over, and make friends with the worms in the deep dark so I can re-emerge, like the pine emperor moth larva burrows into the soil in caterpillar form before it emerges months later, transformed.