This Moment To Be Free

Be a complete summer fallow, land is rendered tender and mellow.  –Sinclair.

For the past year my inner voice has been saying “take 6 months off and rest and do yoga”. And until very recently I have responded to that yearning mantra with all the reasons why it was impossible to do so – can’t afford it, can’t interrupt my career, my husband needs me to have a secure gig, I will let people down, I’m too scared. Meanwhile, all these reasons have slowly been falling away – sold my apartment, moved to a rental, and now have some cash, husband got a steady job doing what he loves, the recent college grads I supervise at the job I am leaving in 3 days and which has been a constant source of frustration have great new projects to do and will be fine, I am too tired and run down to care that I’m scared – until I am left with the clear path – time to take 6 months off, rest and do yoga, become tender, and mellow.

So now I am looking ahead at this clear field that is me, that I am about to leave uncultivated, at rest for half a year…but right now, it is enough to start – simply choose a design, write a few words and know that with the beginning of January 2008, my sabbatical will begin…

I decided to blog because I love to write, and it will be nice to have a record of what I am thinking about during this time. Also, I was told by someone who I allowed to run my life for longer than I care to remember that I have nothing to say, so this is also a bit of a healing journey for me into finding out whether that turns out to be true. On the other hand, my second grade teacher always thought I would make a good writer and sounds disappointed whenever she hears – from my mother who is still in touch with her – that I am doing anything else. But the point is, after listening to every other voice for decades, both external and internalized, I want and need to find out for myself who I am and what I have to say when the quiet kicks in and I am listening to only one voice – my own – the inner director who got me here in the first place by wearing down my resistance and insisting I take this time – this time which is about to begin…

I am a city girl, so I only know about lying fallow as a concept – but I like the concept. That land cannot be worked constantly without it becoming useless, unproductive. That land needs to be left alone once in awhile to rest – the soil fluffed up and then left alone. We don’t do that much in our society – rest either our land or our bodies. Part of the reason is we can’t afford it, and in this case I am very fortunate to be able to afford to take some time off. I know this and am grateful. But even so, if I listened to the voice of the dominant consumer culture inside me I would say – no, I cannot afford this, I need the money all the money for later, for old age, retirement, after I have worked myself into a place of security and worked all the juice out of my bones – all the life out of my proverbial soil.

So, I am taking: taking the money away from future old lady me, and taking the time away from the american work treadmill, making the space and letting the fear be there – the fear that I won’t know what to do next, concern that my inner voice will fail to guide me to the next right thing after this, that I will “waste” time… I am giving myself a winter to rest and a spring to come alive and blossom and I am cultivating faith – that I can drop out of the race, take a deep breath, and just rest. That I can give myself the gift of a body toned inside and out by the ancient and beautiful practice of yoga. That I can quit being a good american consumer, and become just a person who is not “doing” anything to earn money or impress anyone or get me ahead or help anyone else or save the planet in any significant way. Because if I do not rest, the field which is me, the home of my soul, will cease to be a fertile green earth and will become just a rock. Because If I do not rest now and lie fallow, and replenish the soil of my soul I will not be able to give my gifts and I will not be able to help anyone else or be or do any good.

I wanted to wait until I could create the perfect blog – a website more beautiful than any ever seen…I wanted to make art and scan it in and decorate the edges of the blog page with a collage so beautiful and dreamlike it would be like a Joseph Cornell box, but in cyber space. I wanted to wait until I had begun the sabbatical to write about it. I wanted to express myself perfectly – communicate exactly who I am and what I am doing and thinking and feeling – to explain what lying fallow means to me in the most poetic and simplest of words…

…and now I have begun an imperfect blog on a cookie cutter site and expressed myself imperfectly and used a presentation I have seen before on other blogs…I am not the best artist, I am not the most original writer, I am not expressing myself better or more originally or with greater panache than I could imagine…and here I am. Allowed to speak, given free space to write. About to find out who I am when the cultivation stops and the fallow time begins…