LET THE FIELDS GO FALLOW: The importance of taking time away and letting things die

 A passage in the Introduction of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron reads:

“I told myself that if sobriety meant no creativity I did not want to be sober. Yet I recognized that drinking would kill me and the creativity. I needed to learn to write sober—or else give up writing entirely. Necessity, not virtue, was the beginning of my spirituality. I was forced to find a new creative path. And that is where my lessons began.”

This passage—which describes the threshold of accepting that it might be necessary to abandon a calling, when the cost of continuing under the current conditions requires you to disregard your deepest intuitive knowing—is reminiscent of how I’ve approached Fold and Fray over the last few years.

In 2021 I decided to stop using social media; and I began to reduce my time spent online. While some online work is likely intrinsic to the basic functioning of a contemporary organization, not everything we do online is essential. It’s difficult to distinguish what’s necessary for basic functioning, from what’s cultural propaganda. And when you’re imbedded within a system that pushes particular (technological) norms, it’s difficult to inhabit a lens of impartial criticality and see with objectivity or non-attachment.

After working within Fold and Fray full-time for the first few years, I realized that owning and operating an online business necessitated that I spend most of my time at a computer or phone; and that having an “online” business, always involved doing business within virtual spaces. While this appears obvious, it wasn’t, until the felt experience of living it out everyday. In 2022 I took a step back from regular operations. I sensed a misalignment, but could not identify what it was at the time.

If your day-to-day experience with a particular venture starts to feel pervasively divergent from your original purpose, it may be necessary to accept the limitations of what currently exists so that this acknowledgement can initiate a course correction.

————————————————————

Reality checking the potential of a thing with it in actuality, is unbelievably difficult. And when we do start to accurately perceive the truth of something, this new clear sight may lead to having to face the potential loss of an inspired dream, along with the idealized hopes that once felt aligned and possible. This threshold, of recognizing misalignment, is often the place where something must go to die. This involves surrendering. Releasing. It involves letting go, with a proceeding process of transformation that we cannot control. “Letting go” may entail a grief process, in accepting that your hopes and efforts may not have had their right home in the structure you poured time and energy.

However, if circumstances allow, can you extract yourself from the system or structure? Can you go away, so that you can recalibrate in solitude without external interference? When life circumstances can be arranged to allow this process, it may look like stepping away to undergo a deep process of self-reflection, with the knowing possibility that the thing you’ve stepped away from might have to be surrendered to the fates. And consequentially, the unfolding experience of self-reflection and temporary withdrawal might also look different from what you had expected. But you must let go entirely, and imagine that there is no possibility of resurrection, so that clear sight can be found. This is the nature of the Life/Death/Life cycle Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks of in Women Who Run With the Wolves, where there is a cyclic nature of death decay and then rebirth. In order for there to be transformation into new life, something may metaphorically have to die, or at minimum, be completely surrendered. This is fitting for any change of season, as stepping into something new simultaneously involves stepping out of what’s past.

It seems as though there must be some sort of invisible spiritual agility, to sense when this time has come, when something must be surrendered. And then also a second kind of agility to carve out the space required to undergo such a process. Despite how culture tells us not to take time away; we must fight for this sacred pause, protect it from the (internalized) cultural systems that perpetuate a linear narrative based on continuous growth, certainty and output. We must develop the skills to intuit when something starts to become stagnant or no longer works, when the reality of something, isolated from the idea of it, has begun to consume us and is depleting our lifeforce. This intuitive knowing is inherent, but we have been taught to suppress and doubt it as a source of reliable knowledge. We have been taught to struggle, to try and make things work at all costs, even at the cost of our own intuition and authenticity.

Sometimes we need to leave an environment completely, to be without its external influence so that we can gain self-clarity and return to this intuitive knowledge free of bias (from the originating system) so that we can discern the most aligned step forward. Capitalism does not allow for this. As an ideological system, it asks us to grow in a linear fashion without pause or recourse. Capitalism, and other ‘isms’ also rooted in inequity, do not make space for this natural cycle of release and contraction, stasis and incubation, what Dewey would call a process of “surrender and reflection”. Our contemporary culture measures (business) growth based on a linear upwards trajectory, where “more” is the representation of success, and there is an insatiable need to extract without nourishment. This is obviously delusional; since there is not an endless supply of earth to be extracted from without pause. Nature requires periods of rest and replenishment to regenerate. Continuous growth, where the definition of “growth” is based on bigger and more, is simply not sustainable. We cannot extract endlessly without giving back intentionally and with care, honouring that which nourishes us.

And so, in terms of business and the choice to reevaluate Fold and Fray as a “sustainable” business, I’ve realized that I don’t think it’s possible to have a “sustainable business” while also operating within capitalist conceptions of growth. It is a paradox, and therefore illusory.

How we understand “growth” needs to be reconceptualized before it can be adopted as a framework. Because to “grow” in accordance with capitalism will always require “more,” whether that’s more of a physical material/resource or something less visible like time, energy, and attention. And if we choose to adopt this limited interpretation of growth and operate within it as the ideological system to guide decision making; then “sustainability” business efforts, as well-intended as they may be, will likely always fail, since they do not address the underlying issues they claim to address, and are not built upon a skeletal structure that can support real sustainability, since natural cycles do not involve continuous giving and output.

Nature does not conform to this capitalistic version of linear growth. Nature is cyclical, with intrinsic cycles of expansion and contraction. It has cycles of death and life, hibernation and activity. And so, if we claim to value nature, and our actions are rooted in this value as what motivates action, then the ideological systems we adopt to act out these values must also be aligned to the thing being valued.

What might it look like if we begin to orient towards a new definition of “growth” based more upon the natural world and its cycles? What must change for this to happen? My sense is that there must be a philosophical reframe of what “growth” means. “Growth” must become rooted in centering the natural world and intuitive cycles of rest. Growth becomes about how greatly we can honour and respect the natural world, cherish it, be devoted to it as the thing that gives us life. That all actions must flow from this as the root system, the central core that guides decision making.

If sustainability efforts are truly driven by the originating impulse of valuing and respecting nature and a desire to rectify how we co-create on earth, then it does not make sense to do so within the prevailing ideological constraints that currently exist, such as a capitalist growth mindset; since those are the very systems that have led to depletion. You cannot simultaneously care for something and try to restore it, while operating within a structure that has an essence of extractive non-reciprocal growth.

And so, any “sustainability” venture likely needs to first prioritize nature and natural cycles; to be intentionally structured and designed around what makes something sustainable. Otherwise, it will likely always fail to address the issue, and will instead create illusions that mask the truth. These layers of misalignment keep us asleep. They prevent us from seeing that certain preexisting systems do not work for the world we intuitively know is possible.

To revisit Julia Cameron’s introductory quote: If you seek to have a physical reality and day-to-day felt experience that is aligned, you must be ready to let the fields go fallow; to take a period of time to go without in order to gain clear sight; to surrender what needs to be surrendered; to let there be winter, in order for there to be a spring. Some things will die, some things will be burnt off and shed. This time of rest allows what is necessary to emerge anew. What is essential, what wants to grow, will emerge on its own without effort. The rest will be cast off.

Like the seed, changed from its time spent underground, we need those resting states of incubation, states that the dominant culture might perceive as not “growing.” However, these moments of stasis and stillness, these periods of time away from the world above, are regenerative. Regeneration happens on its own, without effort. Nothing needs to be given except time and space. Let the fields go fallow. This is the intrinsic nature of growth.

CITATIONS
Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. 30th anniversary edition., TarcherPeregree, 2016.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Perigee, 2005.

Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. 2nd ed., Ballantine Books, 1992.