Fallow

Writing While Tired (and Black)

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because I’m not really an explicit intention-setting kind of person. Typically, I have goals in mind, and even timelines in mind, but the rhythms of reaching those goals never correspond to what the calendar says is a beginning. Sometimes I insist on starting things at the end of the year when my birthday falls or waiting till the Spring sun has come out of hibernation, prompting me to do the same.

This year, a friend or two posted what their word of the year was, a kind of anchor to set the stage for how they would come into the year. I meditated on it, but refused to post, both because I don’t need people in my business, and because given how much the last two years have humbled absolutely every one of us who thinks we are in control of absolutely anything, I thought, “I dare not.” 2022 will tell us what it is going to be, and we will deal, and that is that.

Still a word came to mind.

Fallow.

It felt true.

I resisted it because I needed another, different word to be true.

If you know anything about farming, you know that one of the ways that farmers grow sustainable crops is that they don’t plant in every field, every year. Some years they let certain fields lie fallow, replenishing their nutrients, through rest, and a lack of agitation. They leave the places where they would otherwise plant unbothered, trusting that nature will do its thing, given time and space.

I have a new book of essays to write. I ain’t got time to lie fallow.  And after two years in quarantine, I thought that was what I was doing.

With the benefit of a stable, well-paying academic job, I have been able to weather the pandemic quietly at my house, teaching on zoom, but spending my days mostly to myself. The loneliness has been hard. But the return of my regular daily nap time has been welcome. Needed. The pandemic has kept me off planes, and ground my penchant for doing way too much, to a much needed halt. Like many I have wondered what I want to get back to doing the most of, at some future time that many of our deluded selves (self-included) are still calling after the pandemic.  

Given the guilt I have felt being able to stay home for much of the last two years, while my mother for instance, has had to go out to work in an office setting every day, sitting with my soul’s insistence on its need for fallowness felt like a luxury I could not or should not indulge.

So I refused to post the word, or to accept it frankly, telling myself that another word would emerge. But there are treasures to be found when we listen to what our souls tell us.

I was talking to one of my girl’s, a preacher and a writer, whom I have weathered the pandemic with (via Facetime of course), about the challenges of the writing life. She is the kind of friend that listens and hears and sees you and the things you are trying to articulate, even when they are inarticulable. She mentioned that she was settling on her word for the year, and I mentioned that though a few words came up, I was resisting the exercise on principle.

The next morning, I woke up to screen shots from her of two pages from one of our shared favorite books, Renita J. Weems’ Listening for God.  Now let me say, Dr. Renita Weems is my favorite womanist theologian, and one of my all time favorite preachers. She’s in my top five, and as a bona fide church girl, my top five preachers are as sacred as my list of top five emcees.

I believe she is the first woman I ever heard preach, and lines from her sermons twenty years ago, still bless me today. Beyond being an important theologian, she is an essayist in the best traditions of Black feminist essayists.

For the last two years, as I have tried to find my way in the essay-writing again, I’ve been reading Black feminist essayists: June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Elizabeth Alexander, Lisa Jones, Joan Morgan, Veronica Chambers, Jamilah Lemieux. The classics plus the new school is the only way.

Though I had not said that the word I rejected was fallow, the screenshot that arrived in my box was from an essay called “Saint Fallow.”

Weems writes:

“Constant fatigue may be a sign of fallowness. I can’t write these days beyond the incoherent ramblings I record in my journal. I want to write. I need to write. My reputation as an academic depends upon my writing articles and books. Without a pulpit, my work depends upon my writing. But nothing comes. Saint Fallow, I fear has visited my soul. Nothing coherent comes to mind. Nothing publishable comes across my computer screen. I feel fatigued. And yet I contracted to meet a publisher’s deadline this month, never suspecting that the deadline might fall during the feast of Saint Fallow, when I can’t think of anything to say. I wish I could do as the bear does and crawl in a hole and hibernate when it’s cold and barren outside, but life does not permit human beings such luxuries. I have to produce when I should be sleeping.”

When I spent the winter break with my parents, I slept so much my mother was concerned. Because home remains a safe place for me, I sleep better there sometimes than I sleep at my own home.

There are levels to tired that I think we haven’t named. Capitalism has produced new forms of exhaustion. Black exhaustion is surely its own category. Indigenous exhaustion, too. Black women’s tired, as evidenced by our endless fighting (for) everyone else, only to find nothing left to fight for ourselves, is not quantifiable. Our bodies (and our collective body politic) are keeping the score though.

So two things are true right now. I am experiencing the “feast of Saint Fallow.” And I have a book to write.

What is a writer to do?

Weems says:

“Not having the luxury to withdraw into a cave of solitude, free of deadlines and obligations, I learn to confine my work to the things that thrive on winter conditions. Only certain kinds of books get written in the winter. These are the ones that require a considerable amount of rest and sleeping on it. …Realizing that it’s impossible to be in season all the time, I find it easier simply to let the season dictate what gets done and what doesn’t.”

That’s a whole word.

I am writing a book. I am honoring my tired. I am accepting the answers my soul sends.

Amen.

P.S. Due dates > deadlines