Finding The Fallow Field

My grandfather was a hard man.

Like all hard men, he was shaped by difficult circumstances.

But his last twenty five years were blessed by the embrace of his family and community. He became a softer, better version of himself.

I start this piece with him because of something he loved to say.

“It’s a beautiful day in Fallowfield Township!”

He would say it proudly, and with a big grin that lit up his handsome face. My mother plucked it out of her memories as a way to see beauty through pain and fear, a talent she has perfected.

It’s a simple phrase. But as with so many simple things, it can hold transformative power.

Fallow.

I find it to be a lyrical word. It rolls off my tongue. It looks good on the page. It has a particularly English landscape feel to it. I see a newly plowed field lined with stone walls. A rabbit hopping across into a brambled hedgerow.

Fallow is a word given to us by the farmer. Distinctively agricultural.

Farmers understand dirt. They spend time scratching it up, moving it around, seeding it and then pulling vibrant life out of it. All that observation of the dirt has taught them that something good happens if they have the willpower to leave it alone.

Just for a season.

What happens during the fallow time?

Bugs happen. Worms and centipedes and creatures that build air inside of hard clay. Complexity. In short, a million things all at once, working in tandem. Just because they are out of our viewpoints, we can be tricked into thinking nothing is happening. But healthy soil, which really just means complex soil, is a key to healthy plants. Its so simple it seems over-obvious. Tragically, like so many leaps of modernity, this miraculous fallow time has been replaced with a hyper-drive of the pesticide/chemical fertilizer trap.

A never-resting cocktail of production.

I use this old farming word, not to pontificate on the state of industrial farming, but to point towards something much more reachable.

Our own creativity.

My father tapped into the fallow field during a time of great struggle. His family coal business, which was, in many ways, his identity, had been dismantled. He quite literally walked his fallow fields searching for the past. He pulled dozens, maybe hundreds, of Native American arrowheads out of his plowed farm while he contemplated how to reinvent himself.

The metaphor is strong. Unmistakable.

He used his fallow time by physically meditating the dirt.

Can you meditate the dirt?

I am learning to seek out the fallow times. The fallow places.

I have stumbled into these places most of my life through an innate sense of self-preservation. As a complicated introvert, I am pulled to the quiet places, especially when the world throws its chaos towards me.

As I was becoming an artist, I had the good fortune to also be a massage therapist. I look back on the thousands of sessions I practiced as sacred moments of fallow time. The darkness, the quiet, the communing with one human in a safe environment. The simple physicality of touch combined with a meditative state, was a recipe for creative smoldering.

A bit like the reddog I love so much.

It’s not just about finding the fallow but also avoiding the anti-fallow.

They are the place fillers. The unquiet distractors. They seem built to siphon and dilute my purpose.

The farther into life I get, the more I want to carve them out of it.

Let’s start with the easy ones:

Political and drug advertisements, both visual and audible.

Yard signs. Social media scrolling.

Reality TV. All TV?

A particular tone of modern pop music.

A road littered with bad architecture. I have an aversion to the dollar stores. I find them to be insulting to the word architecture and an affront to the original and iconic general stores of the past.

Those are the easy ones for me. I wonder what anti-fallow things you worry about?

The curse of our world is that we are surrounded with non-fallow distractions to the point that we lose our ability to refresh our spirits.

In this world of constancy, maybe we need to not just find our fallow fields, but protect them. Build stone walls around them.

The Ruins Project was a fallow field for almost 100 years. Its hard won cracks and crumbles. Its mosses and stalactites. Its trees inside rooms. Its bird nests and bat colonies.

They took their good old, fallowfield time.

When The Pittsburgh Coal Company closed up and left it all behind in 1946, nothing much happened. But as I have taken to saying…

Everything happened.