A Fallow Year

If you pay attention to this sort of thing, maybe you heard last week that the Glastonbury music festival was cancelled for a second year in a row. Of course this isn't really a big surprise, but it's deflating nonetheless, even if like me, the idea of camping in the mud for a week during British "summer" has never registered very high on your bucket list. I went to Lollapalooza as a teenager and I've been to Coachella five times. I'm all set with festivals. But you will 100% find me watching the livestream on BBC4 from the comfort of my couch.

Yet Glasto (which I considered putting in quotes, but decided that made it worse) is something I actually think about a lot since having learned from a friend–who's been there himself many times–that the festival takes a pause every five years or so. This is called a "fallow" year, and it's meant to give the organizers, but more importantly the land a break from being moshed all over by hundreds of thousands of pairs of wellies bouncing up and down to an Underworld reunion set.

This idea has stuck with me, and I've returned to it again and again, particularly when I feel like my creative energy has reached a limit. It's not a creative block, per se. It’s just that the ground has been trodden into oblivion, it’s strewn with trash, and it's just fucking wasted. Am I talking about my mind or the fields after the festival? Either way.

I find myself feeling this way at the end of a big project that I've thrown my whole self into with relentless drive, which, as my typical approach to anything I'm working on maybe has its own inherent issues, but that's a convo for another time. In any case, some kind of come-down transition period would be the natural response. Unfortunately, my natural response tends to be the acute desire to bulldoze the wreckage and start building again as soon as possible. All that open space feels like wasted potential. Thank u, next.

But then I remember that Glastonbury is on a farm, and that the concept of fallowness is an important lesson in responsible agriculture. What happens when land is used with the mindset that it should be farmed until the resources run out? It becomes vulnerable to threats, resistant to treatments, weak, depleted. Barren.

So sometimes the best thing you can do is disrupt the lifecycle.

Last year when I stepped away from Flo's, I had nothing but time to do nothing. For the first week or two I stumbled around the house, days blurring into nights into days again, a potentially very slippery slope. I felt agitated and anxious to get something new spinning up again. It was like my creative clock was ticking and that if I didn't ACT NOW, time would be up and my ideas would expire.

Being in lockdown was a bold underline of the suddenly vast expanse of unstructured time stretching in front of me, but my gut said it was way too soon to be plotting my next move, and really, I was too heartbroken to even try anyway. Whether I liked it or not, I was in a fallow period.

To be honest, even my version of doing nothing was still built around doing lots of things, and it was most certainly a privilege afforded by my partner's support. So I read, I reignited my writing practice, I took a bunch of free online literary theory classes from distinguished professors. I did yoga with Adriene. I made a lot–and I mean A LOT–of playlists. I baked bread, obviously, various kinds. I even sent a few newsletters. I wasn't generating anything in particular, but I could feel myself re-generating.

There's a related concept in conservation biology known as rewilding, and I like the idea that all of the random creative pursuits I was engaging with were helping me to "rewild" my brain. I could let my interests wander, sowing themselves where they may, and just let them grow without any intervention. The trick is that you can't worry about whether all of things that pop up during this time will take root, and you have to resist any urge to prune them into something more refined. You just have to trust that they're giving you something you need, replenishing what you'd lost and building up a store of nutrients for later.

In principle, even though going fallow and rewilding imply a kind of effortlessness, in fact they are more deliberate decisions made in order to restore and protect the land. They are about building resilience in the face of future challenges and uncertainties. They are a necessity for preserving our ecosystem, literally and metaphorically.

Personally, I'm only just now looking out over a field sprouting with possibility, fertile ground waiting to be tilled and re-planted. Spring is still a ways’ away, and I’m trying not to rush it forward.

But maybe now that the bulldozers have just hauled off some massive heaps of rubbish from our shared garden plot of consciousness, we can allow ourselves a kind of collective fallow period, to restore and regenerate all that's been sapped from our souls. Even though we're keen to get back out there and start moshing around again, I think we could all use a break from the festival.