Fallow Fields

This last year has been a difficult one for me, though not really because of the pandemic. I spent the first several months of the year pregnant with twins and the latter half of the year with newborn twins and all the attendant challenges: bitter exhaustion, frustration, feeling like I wasn’t giving my other kids enough attention, nursing issues, worries, and feelings of panic around the subject of sleep. We moved right before the babies were born, and my postpartum recovery was—no surprise—rather harder than it had been with previous pregnancies.

I knew that writing would be difficult for a season. And it certainly has been.

Then my literary agent left agenting so, quite suddenly, my book goals had to take an indefinite pause. There are very few things I have managed to accomplish…few things I have even attempted, to be honest. The rare blog post here. A short thought there. A sentence’s worth of an idea.

Writing requires an amount of time and a level of focus that has been nearly impossible to finagle of late, and I am already on the slower, long-steeping, slow-sifting end of the writer spectrum.

In short, this particular field of my life has been lying fallow. A year with nothing planted and nothing grown. Wind, rains, and sun, but nothing to hold in the hand.

It is frustrating to leave the field untouched, watching it sit, seemingly lifeless, out of the corner of your eye. Disheartening. Maddening. Acres of lost opportunity. The feeling of falling behind and the dread of losing momentum, never to be regained.

But I hope that this fallowing, unintentional though it was, will do what land-rest is meant to do. Enrich the soil and make then subsequent crop far healthier and stronger than it could have been otherwise, nourished by long stillness, bursting with ready life when the time comes.