a fallow season

image credit: art by Betye Saar, caption by @gendersauce, via Anna

Fallow state is quiet, regenerative. I am practicing yoga every morning, making frothy matcha lattes, going on long afternoon walks in the early fall sunshine. I write myself reminders for every little thing — checklists to eat enough, to call people who love me, to pay my bills, to pick myself up off the floor.

I am recovering, from months each of a shattering heartbreak, a debilitating bout with long covid, a round of escalating ableist discrimination. This year beat me senseless, and I collapsed. What I can manage right now is to breathe, walk, sleep — and that is enough, for now.

There are moments when I can feel the soil composting — a few roots settling in, maybe some tendrils of growth, soft rich mulch breaking down, a little wellspring of creativity starting to replenish itself beneath the surface. I’m trying to be patient, pull out the sticks and rocks but mostly let things lie. It is hard to be patient.

I am a mender; I am drawn to fix things, sometimes compulsively. In the midst of the worst of my long covid brain fog, I found myself mending absolutely every ripped textile I could find in the house — from an impeccable invisible patch on my sister’s silk jumpsuit to the strongest backstitch I could manage on our laundry hamper. When I can’t fix something — my brain, my body, my relationships, the -isms of the world — I find solace in hand stitching, in a slow discipline of patience, in “letting a wound live.”

a few medicines, or, how to be in a fallow state:

• surrender to it, again, and again, and again.

• binge some favorite tv. I am on a diet of early 2000s romcoms, every Jane Austen remake, and Only Murders in the Building.

• spend the fall equinox new moon under a thunderstorm clattering against tin-lined skylights, soaking in a salt bath lit by beeswax tapers and flashes of lightning.

• when people offer to cook for you, say yes. when your mother cooks chaval in the same pot she used to make ghee, drive two hours just to taste it.

• take marlee grace’s quilt class if you want to be part of the most magical place on the internet. also, if you want to rip some fabric and maybe make a quilt.

• cry, a lot. add sweet garden mint and lime to your glass, to replenish the water you lose.

• forgive yourself, again, and again, and again.

until next time.