The Fallow Season

In farming, there is a season where the land is left unsown.

To anyone passing by, the field looks empty. Quiet. Even wasteful, especially when the sun is high and the growing season is in full swing. It can look like neglect. Like laziness. Like something is being missed.

But that stillness isn’t absence. It’s intention.

The soil is resting, restoring what has been taken, rebuilding what cannot be seen from the surface. It is a kind of work that doesn’t announce itself. A kind that requires patience and trust that what is happening underneath will matter later.

I didn’t understand this kind of work for a long time. I had grown used to movement. To urgency. To the constant pull of something needing to be done, fixed, or achieved. Somewhere along the way, I started to confuse the rushing with importance, and movement with growth.

I had convinced myself that life and living needed to be about doing and working and striving.

And when that rushing and movement finally stopped, when there was no crisis or demand tugging at me, I didn’t feel peace.

I felt… empty.

An emptiness I decided to sit with.

Recently, I sat on my patio with my coffee, doing nothing but enjoying the feel of the sun on my face and watching the steam rise from the cup in my hands. No phone. No plan for the day beyond being in it. And there was a part of me that immediately tried to measure that moment as if it were lacking.

As if I were.

Not long after, a friend asked me, “How are you? What have you been up to?” I searched for something to offer her. Something that sounded like progress. Something that would translate well from the inside of my life to the outside of hers.

But there was no list. No big updates. No milestones or movement I could point to. Just quiet mornings. Slower days. Space where there used to be pressure. For a moment, I saw my life the way I thought she might see it: still, uneventful, maybe even boring.

But instead of the judgment I expected, she softened. She let out a small sigh and said, “I miss those days.”

And just like that, something shifted.

What I had been quietly judging in myself, she recognized as something rare. Something she longed for.

It made me realize how easily we misread our own seasons. How quickly we label rest as stagnation, or silence as emptiness, simply because it doesn’t look like progress from the outside.

But this quiet is not nothing. It is the space that allows return.

Like a house where the construction has finally stopped, and for the first time, you can hear your own footsteps again. Your own breath. The small, steady sounds that always went with you, but were buried beneath the noise.

This is not a lack of direction. It is recovery. It is care. It is the kind of season that makes the next one possible.

So if from the outside it looks like nothing is happening, I understand. But beneath the surface, something is being restored. And I am trying really hard not to rush it along.

I am here.

And as it turns out, home is a very quiet place.

This is my fallow season.

Your Trusted Friend ♡