The fallow years

by Mikhaeyla Kopievsky

Spring has finally arrived after a long winter, bringing with it torrential rain and crimson sunsets. Lightning flashes in dark evening clouds, and the longer days and higher temperatures have ushered in a rapid flush of life. Our farm is bursting at the seams with it — winter trees erupting with green crowns, fruit ripening, insects and arachnids scuttling and hovering everywhere, frogs trilling, rabbits darting, foxes stalking, snakes writhing with their red underbellies flashing, eagles and egrets soaring high while wrens and finches dart about their tiny and compact nests. From my writing desk I can see our herd of cattle in the far paddock, reaping the benefit of land that was fallow this time last year.

It’s wild to think it has been two years since my last post. In this day and age of streaming and scrolling and binge watching everything on 1.5x speed just to get through it, of hustle culture and FOMO and AI-generated TLDRs, the thought of slowing down, tapping out, and resting up seems almost fatal. The algorithm will punish you! You’ll become irrelevant! Your followers will find the new, next big thing! You’ll be forgotten, you’ll be overlooked, you’ll languish in obscurity!

But there’s a reason life is built around cycles – of seasons, and circadia, and menstruation, and REM. We’re not built to stay at one speed, to always be on. The lulls are just as important as the rushes.

The concept of fallow is an old one. In Leviticus 25, God speaks to Moses on Mt Sinai, instructing the Israelites to observe a sabbath for the land:

 ³ For six years sow your fields, and for six years prune your vineyards and gather their crops. ⁴ But in the seventh year the land is to have a year of sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards. ⁵ Do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the grapes of your untended vines. The land is to have a year of rest. 

Resting, or fallowing, pastures allows the land to recover: without the usual disturbances of constant activity (plants growing, animals moving, machines disrupting), the earth is able to store organic matter, retain moisture, and starve the pests and pathogens that would otherwise linger, grow and thrive.

But being fallow isn’t about not doing anything. Just like sleeping isn’t just a void of nothingness – it has its own shape and colour and timbre. And so does fallow.

The word itself dates back to the 1300s, hailing from the Proto-Germanic *falgo (source also of Old High German felga “harrow,” German Felge “plowed-up fallow land,” East Frisian falge “fallow,” falgen “to break up ground”) (etymonline.com). Originally, ‘fallow’ was used to describe “plowed land,” but in the early 16th century it shifted its meaning slightly to “land plowed but not planted“.

The last two years have been my fallow years. Not empty time, or quiet time, just time and life passing along a different wavelength. For me, going fallow is a shift to greater introspection – private thoughts not public conversations, secreting away rather than sharing. Sometimes it’s a kindness to myself — giving permission to be less active, less accessible, less productive. Most times it’s my survival instinct kicking in — when a tiger is chasing you, you learn pretty quickly to shed what isn’t essential.

Luckily, it turns out that writing is still essential (just not writing about writing). Over the last two years, I’ve finished writing a contemporary fantasy, wrote a few short stories and submitted others (that were, respectively, published in Uncharted, longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Aurealis award for best fantasy short story), and had the pleasure of seeing Tasmanian Gothic make it to the semi-finals of the 2024 SPSF Competition (mixing my harvest period with my fallow, so to speak).

With the contemporary fantasy now in the query trenches, I’ve turned my attention to drafting the next work in progress, and all this new activity has done to me what spring has done to my farm: it’s pulled me from my fallow state. I’m energised in a way that is more outward looking than inward – I want to have the conversations, and put out feelers into the world, testing for the reverb, getting caught up in the messy white noise.

So. for now, I’m back. There will be fallow periods again to be sure, but the cycle is now firmly in its high activity state. The tilled soil has been planted, the cattle have returned to the rested fields, winter is behind us and spring beckons with her warmth and joy and insistence to come play.