Fallow Time
This is not as common an experience in this day and age, but winter once widely demanded a ceasing from much of the work that occupied human life. I’m thinking of agricultural or nomadic lifestyles, I suppose, and the impact of winter on planting, harvesting, and foraging. My sister recently remarked on this fallow-like state of the season while we watched a period farming drama and observed the changes the farmers experienced to their life rhythms in wintertime. It got me thinking.
Most of us are not dependent on the natural season to dictate the kind of work we do or have available to us, and I think that’s why we have come to have an expectation that the season’s changes won’t, or even shouldn’t, have an effect on us. I hear this reality in the widespread panic when the time change occurs that quickens and elongates the darkness of night. For weeks and weeks, we comment on it, incredulous–no, offended–by its audacity to return again another year. I also feel this reality in my life as a kind of disorienting confusion about the disruption of winter on established routines and rhythms. Since November, I have been scrambling to find new footing in old routines, rather than surrendering to new ones. (My awareness of this fact has brought little effect).
Cold causes things to slow down. To pause. To freeze in time–or rather, to freeze through time. It makes unavailable some of the resources, opportunities, and abilities we once had access to. In winter, we are working with a new deck, as it were–I think more than any other season–so it would follow that the game must be set and played differently for a time. And yet I feel myself pushed to maintain life at a consistent pace, rhythm, and expectation year-round. In some ways, we’ve created artificial things to make up for what is lost. This only adds to my mental confusion as I exist in seasonal limbo, because they never quite succeed in maintaining the old norm. Something’s always off-kilter.
What might I miss by living a summer life in a winter season? What value is there in frozen stasis if I could accept it as good, natural, or right, instead of labeling it laziness or waste and therefore avoid it furiously? What does it mean to live a winter life? I find myself wondering: What do trees do in winter? Do they cease to grow? No–rather, they focus their growth into slow cultivation of the essential new for the coming spring. They germinate slowly and secretly–the way a baby grows in utero. They are progressing, though unseen. They are alive, though something more than the five senses must be used to detect this. This kind of cultivation requires something internal and instinctive. Maybe even spiritual. Winter growth is felt within the particular being and is not something that can be evidenced or effectively shared. It’s intimate and personal. They require particular gentleness and care, these embryonic, microscopic things–things this world can quickly trample in its dashing about. We are not taught to cherish this stage, and yet it must come before any developed entity. Our roughness harms the things that we want to grow because we refuse them their essential processes. We hurry them up, and they are sometimes even killed by a pace they were never meant to keep.
These are the things I’m considering in this winter of my personal and family life. They’re intimate and personal, our plans, hopes, and desires. Though evidence of them is yet unseen, they exist in an embryonic state that is the first stage of growth. I am tired of waiting on them, but since they are not here, this could be the reason: it’s not spring yet. And they may never come if I cannot respect their pace of growth.
Here’s the rub: our winter seasons don’t always align with the one happening outside our window. Winter seasons can come at any time, really, influenced by internal and external environments. Maybe winter came early and is staying longer because of loss, confusion, or grief. And though I can get on board (I don’t like to, but I’m capable of it) with the prescription of rest, gentleness, fallowness, and quiet waiting in wintertime, the lack of end-date on that is particularly panic-inducing. Panic tends to disrupt rest. So here I am, sitting in the middle of all these reluctant thoughts about the beauty and value of winter while struggling with the doubt that it will ever end, and all the ensuing implications.
If all I can do is take cues from the natural world (the only observable suggestion for some of these doubts), I have to admit that I am repeatedly shown that winter does, in fact, come to an end. I have seen for three years now that those fuzzy buds on the Tulip Trees lining my driveway will break open. They’ve been there all winter with no observable change, but every year they are suddenly, startlingly there, deeply purple and vibrating with pre-blossoming energy. To date, they’ve never failed me. I’ve looked around, and I have to tell you, that’s the nearest thing to a promise I’ve found. And in these lingering dark days, it’s the pinprick of light I’m heading towards.
