Fallow

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings. 
— Wendell Berry, “The Real Work,” Standing by Words (1983)

A field left fallow looks the same as a field abandoned. From the road, the two look identical. No crops, no rows, no one tending. Just earth left alone. The farmer who chose it knows. The neighbor passing by often does not.

I have not written in months. The depression did not arrive on a single day. It crept in like the cold through a closed window. My world got smaller. The calls I did not return became the calls I could not return. I closed my eyes and the bubble on my text messages went from none to 83. The page I kept meaning to face stayed blank.

I did not pick up. I picked up everything else. Food I did not need, the caffeine euphoria, the endless scroll, the news as prayer beads, hours dissolved into AI. Grindr always could offer the sexiest of escapes. These passed for living. They were no less how I was leaving the room. The program has names for this. We never run out of substitutes. We run out of denial.

I told myself I needed rest, and that was true. I told myself I would come back to it soon, and that was the lie I needed to keep going.

Fallow is what soil does when it has been giving for too long. My bipolar runs the cycle on its own schedule. The up phase plants more rows than the field can sustain. The down phase is what comes when the land has been asked too often. Old farmers knew this. So did whoever wrote the second step. Restoration is the soil’s work, if I let it. The land needs to lie still. It needs to hold its rain, take its frost, let what was buried come up on its own time. The field that looks dead is restoring itself.

What no one told me is that fallow looks like quitting from the inside, too. The shame is the same. I sit with the silence and cannot remember why I used to write, used to call, used to leave the house. I begin to suspect the field was always empty, that there was nothing in me in the first place. That is depression’s lie about rest. It tells me the dormancy is the truth and the bloom was the illusion.

But the field knows. The roots are holding what looks like death. The nitrogen is rebuilding underneath. And one morning the green comes through, ankle-high, and I remember. Nothing was lost. It was held.

Berry’s last line is the one I can only hear now, not then. The impeded stream is the one that sings. Depression could not say that out loud while it was happening. The block becomes the music. The not-writing becomes the next thing to write about.

Coming back is its own work. The tools are where I left them, dulled. The rows have to be cut again. The rooms are where I left them too. Still meeting, still pouring bad coffee while the truth gets told without me. The chairs do not remember who has been gone. They only know who sits down. I am not the same farmer who walked away. This field has been fallowed before. I have stood at this edge more than once. Each return teaches me something the last did not. I am slower now, more careful, less willing to forget what overuse cost the last time. I will plant differently this time.

I am writing this because I am back at the edge of the field with my hands full. Not because I am better. Because I am willing to begin.