Creative Mamas

One of my favorite things in cyberspace is the Google define feature. Go to www.google.com and type the following in the search bar:

define: fallow

Here is some of what Google came up with:

• Left unplowed and unseeded during a growing season; "fallow farmland"
• Undeveloped but potentially useful; "a fallow gold market"
• The practice of leaving a field for one year (out of three) uncropped to recover its natural fertility. (Fields not fallowed must be given costly fertilizer each year. Desperate third world farmers often cannot afford fertilizer, and also cannot afford to leave a field fallow. Such fields will soon lose their fertility.)
• Land is considered fallow if it is kept free of growing plants during the growing season (March to October) using cultivation. The process is called "fallowing."

For our purposes fallowing is a skill that artists must cultivate in order to maintain their creative fertility. But for many of us this is easier said than done.

We resist fallowing because we are fearful that it will never end. We fear that any “down time” is an indication that we have lost our creativity and artistic inspiration forever. And although we may posses the knowledge that fallowing is valuable and necessary to our creative fertility – the actual practice of fallowing makes us shiver in our boots. We push and push and push ourselves, then one day we find ourselves staring at a blank page and we diagnose ourselves with writer’s block. Boom! We’re dead in the water!

I think this fear is exasperated for artist moms. What if we find ourselves lying limp in a pile of laundry 3 months or (gulp) 3 years from now!?! Just thinking of the energy it will take to re-establish those hard-won boundaries to reclaim our artistic time/space is enough to make us lock ourselves in the laundry room once and for all.

So how do we push past this fear and allow ourselves the recovery time we need? One solution is to never give up the boundaries we have established around our creative practice no matter what our current creative practice may look like. We can maintain our creative time/space and simply use it differently – for recovery rather than productivity. We can go into our “work” room, hang up the Do Not Disturb sign and paint our toenails instead of the canvas.

Sometimes we don’t know how much time we actually need to spend fallowing. We will keep staring at the clock and the calendar and asking, “Am I fertile yet.” Our artistic community can come in handy here. Make a tea date with someone in your artistic community. If you can’t keep yourself from talking about your creative ideas and vision – then it is time to get back into action artistically speaking. If your conversation tends more to shopping, books, travel, relationships, kids (all wonderful things), then you are still in fallowing mode. Enjoy the conversation and the tea. Treat yourself to something that makes you feel delicious.

Our mantras, “I am that” and “Simply being. Not doing.” can come in handy during our fallowing too. “I am that” means you wear many hats, but you are not defined by the hat you happen to be wearing in the moment. A nice alternative mantra might be “I am ALL that. No matter what”. Hang on to your artistic identity no matter what. Artists empower themselves when they give themselves the time they need to regenerate their creative spirits.

“Simply Being. Not Doing” is a reminder that you are not a human “doing” you are a human “being”. Simply be that and let go of doing for awhile. The most important questions we can ask ourselves during our periods of artistic fallowing are:

What makes me feel good?

What makes me laugh?

Who will give me a foot massage?

May your fallowing be rich and self-nurturing!