Fallow time. It’s a glorious and vital expression. Its understanding marks the crossing of a threshold from left to right brain. It commends an easing, a descent that can only be done through trust and the shelving – temporarily at least – of the masculine mind, which is hot and heavy on linear ascents but befuddled and floundering with much else.
If we look at our world, it doesn’t take long to see how many men need to rest in fallow time, re-orientate before inflicting themselves on others once more.
Fallow time is as imperative for we humans as for the seed in the ground. It demands we remain in the dark, accept life needs loam, occasionally hibernation and often downtime.
Once, nearly 20 years ago, on the side of a hill, I stood naked at the rim of a forest cloaked only in the mask of the green man, that wild inhabitant of the woods who urges men to look to the wild.
I am unsure why I was chosen for the honour: I was in poor physical shape, my feelings glacially impaired. I suspect the leaders of men recognized my need and had thrown out the meritocracy of the day world in keeping with our mission.
If you want to benefit from fallow time, you have to do that. You have to accept the necessity of stillness, of doing nothing and allow the mysterious to do its sacred work, within you.
It was understood by at least some in the group that the making of personhood is a sacred task and one few of us understand.
Ontological guilt, the refusal and denigration of our need for being-ness is a shuck for most men. Yet in denying it, we live lop-sided lives bent solely on success, our myopia failing to even understand what true success looks like.
Sam Keen, an academic and mythologist, who introduced me to the term ‘fallow time’ nails it:
‘Generations of self-made men ignored or despised the wildness within the self because it could not be brought under the control of the rational mind and the disciplined will. To gain the world they sacrificed their own soulfulness and abandoned the dream-body, the untamed landscapes of the interior life.’
I had firsthand experience of the constricted nature of the self-made man in the spindly figure of my adoptive father whose drive to succeed came, like so many, as attempt to stave off an inner poverty.
It is the common pursued of the unloved.
And it goes like this: if I succeed, surely I matter, if I make my mark on the world, I will be a real man and finally, I will feel lovable.
It was not his fault he couldn’t love, that he had to make it up with his head, which could only ever fire arrows of duty and responsibility, which came from his conditioned mind.
By his own and the world’s standards, he was a success, but his soul remained in exile, his behaviour often mean-spirited, sometimes reprehensible.
I will never forget the day he took my then seven-year-old son for a walk, bad-mouthing me, attempting to sabotage and degrade as he would go on to do repeatedly throughout my life.
It would be fair to say, without any real access to his own heart, which had been deeply wounded as a child, there was little I wanted from his armory.
Our mutual rejection finally plummeted into a hellish finale. I haven’t seen him in 14 years.
If only he had known about the need of fallow time.
But his Welsh puritanism could not possibly have understood the joys of laying low, true contemplation and the fruits of turning the soul’s soil.
It wasn’t his fault. But for a man who was always talking about the need to be responsible, he never did take any, not in the real sense.
We all have conditions on our soul, individual and family karma, inherited patterns or samskaras and we blindly seek our fortune in this world without stopping to consider if our masculine drive can heal us.
The hard reality is it can’t and outer success is often mirrored within by a lifetime of wheel-spinning.
What is needed is initiation and descent, the hero’s journey as mapped out in the old stories. Yet most men simply keep encircling the same hoary vision circumscribed by the limits of the western mind, long bleached.
A few years before I was reborn that day as the green man, I set eyes on the mythologist and story teller Michael Meade as he strode the corridor of the retreat house where I was working.
He writes about the incurable soul sickness that inhabits many westerners, which sprouts like fungus in the unawakened mind:
‘In a sense, people have within them a room or chamber where a part of them is always lying incurably ill. The illness comes from being separated from the beauty and full range of life the soul desires.’
It is, by definition, utterly hopeless to imagine the soul can be healed when we are living in a soulless fashion.
What is needed is a shift from an ego-centric to a soul-centric life and, as Meade says, that goes contrary to all most of us know.
In fact, he suggests, we only get better when we have passed beyond human aid and into those territories that risk a brush with death.
Sometimes, that is the only way we can move our lives deeper toward our true being outside the mind’s limited understanding.
As a toddler, after my father left the family, I developed a near fatal pneumonia as grief choked my lungs and hovering between life and death, I found myself in the void, in total darkness, attached to no-thing.
I would later realize with a start that hell is not flaming hot but the icy coldness of total separation. When I revisit that place, or seem to, it can still drive me insane.
I had passed into the territories Meade wrote about and the whole axis of my life would be different, separating me from most people, forcing me to an inner life, a solitude, which I long resisted.
Finally, once I overcome the desperate feelings of emptiness – what most of us fear and spend our lives avoiding, I came home to my own soul.
‘The modern world, by trumpeting the doctrine of self-sufficiency, has denied the soul and forced it to eke out its existence on the margins.’
More than most men, the late Irish former priest and poet John O’Donohue understood the soul’s shyness, its need to shelter and protect itself.
Sometimes, that means we need to live underground for a while, adopt fallow time.
In his book Anam Cara, or soul friend, he coaxes the reader not to interfere with this sacred process, to re-align with the rhythmic nature of life, to go easy and stay in the dark as long as needed.
‘It is wise to allow the soul to carry on its secret work in the night side of your life….There is a healing for each of our wounds, but this healing is waiting in the indirect, oblique, and non-analytic side of our nature.’
Life has its own timing and will never bow to our control for it knows better than we do what we need and is merciful in that way.
There is a mystery in surrender, in venturing outside the circle of our awareness. It takes risk and faith, yet as I found sometimes life will force our hand if we don’t go to it voluntarily.
Self-sufficiency is a necessary stage in our development, but it corresponds with an adolescent phase of development and belongs to the sphere of ego.
But there is a deeper truth and a possibility for us that lives beyond our concepts and ambitions.
It lives in the arena of the greater Self.
Fallow time is not the laziness the mind says but both necessity and aperture towards a much truer life.
In Praise of the Joys of Fallow Time