How often do you check in with your mental landscape? When was the last time you sat quietly with yourself, turning the gaze inward to spend time getting to know your inner lakes & rivers, the vertiginous contours or endless desert spaces. It’s a practice I’ve developed over the years as I find it helps to better understand the direction the heart is heading in (which can be completely opposite to where the mind thinks we’re going). For a long time my internal landscape was a busy New York crossroads: exhilarating, potential-filled, confusing. A few years ago everything shifted dramatically so that I could see all the various rain-clouds that made up the different elements of my work, my Self, coalesce into a great river flowing in the same direction and a new feeling of calm confidence rolled through me. A conversation with a new friend last night had me check in again and the result found me stood in a fallow field: a space that has been intensively farmed for decades and that now needs time to let the wildflowers grow, to call the bees to return; one that will only recover from overfarming in its own time. The Fallow Field is not a space celebrated by our faster, intensive, devouring culture, but living this slow life on the road allows (demands) it. The definition of fallow is ‘inactive’ but this feels incorrect, it might be inactive in a capitalist, productive sense, but the Fallow Field grows grasses, trees & wildflowers, calls butterflies & fieldmice; the hare & the deer. The Fallow Field evolves naturally with the seasons, embracing a slow return to nature who is never inactive, but who works diligently everyday to support organic, authentic growth, & I feel a deep sense of childlike wonder embracing this new (ancient) way of existing in the world. ? of baby Arthur by @rhi_mckeand ????
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