When creativity needs a season of rest

From small-bed zin­nia war­riors to folks tend­ing hun­dreds of acres, most of my yoga stu­dents gar­den or farm in some way. Before every class, there is inevitable chat­ter about when the toma­toes are going into the ground, how some­one hurt their back feed­ing the live­stock, or does any­one know some­one who fix­es lawn mow­ers. Someone will share paw paws from their tree, toma­toes from their gar­den, or bulbs from their grandmother’s prize-win­ning iris­es. There is also much dis­course about rain, either the lack of it or how there’s been too much, or do we think it’s gonna rain today?

This week, the dis­cus­sion was about crop rota­tion, some­thing I haven’t thought about much in my life. But for peo­ple who live off the land, it is a top­ic of great impor­tance. In Kentucky, the prac­tice of crop rota­tion is a turn­ing and a return­ing, a trust that what rests today might nour­ish us tomorrow.

I learned that, for much of the ear­ly 20^th cen­tu­ry, Kentucky wis­dom held that rotat­ing grain crops like corn with grass­es like wheat result­ed in the sweet­est corn. But that prac­tice fad­ed in many parts of the state dur­ing the 1950s and 1960s as farm­ers increas­ing­ly relied on fer­til­iz­ers and pes­ti­cides instead of rotation. 

In 1981, University of Kentucky Agronomists James Herbek and Lloyd Murdock launched a mod­ern corn-soy­bean rota­tion study that showed that corn grown alter­nate­ly with soy­beans aver­aged about 10 bushels per acre more than con­tin­u­ous corn, help­ing to reestab­lish crop rota­tion as a core prac­tice in Kentucky farming. 

It’s a long-game love note to the land. One sea­son, corn, tall and reach­ing. The next, soy, return­ing nitro­gen to the earth. Then per­haps clover, or wheat, or sim­ply a fal­low pause where noth­ing is demand­ed and every­thing is qui­et­ly restored. 

I often think of my cre­ativ­i­ty like corn, with con­stant out­put, vis­i­ble growth, and mea­sur­able pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. Write more. Produce more. Share more. I long to be like the Stephen Kings and the Mary Olivers, those giants who book­mark each day by a cer­tain num­ber of words. But after a scant few min­utes of watch­ing a blink­ing cur­sor, I’m apt to give it up because don’t the dish­es need wash­ing and shouldn’t I go sweep the floors? It’s har­vest­ing in a dif­fer­ent way, this insa­tiable need to feel productive. 

As the house gets clean­er and the words grow fur­ther apart, I can’t help but won­der if crop rota­tion isn’t the same sacred pat­tern as writ­ing. Like the soil, I can­not give indef­i­nite­ly with­out tend­ing to what replen­ish­es me. Without rota­tion, even the rich­est ground becomes depleted.

A cre­ative block, then, is not fail­ure, but fal­low land. There is no shame in a rest­ing field. No farmer stands at the edge of a qui­et plot and demands it yield. They under­stand that microbes are rebuild­ing, nutri­ents are cycling, and the soil is remem­ber­ing itself.

What if I extend­ed myself the same grace? I haven’t been writ­ing much late­ly. In fact, this piece is the first thing I’ve writ­ten in many weeks. I’ve been pub­lish­ing pieces I’ve writ­ten in the last few years dur­ing espe­cial­ly fruit­ful bursts of creativity. 

The once-fer­tile land­scape of my imag­i­na­tion seems bar­ren, but a writ­ing block doesn’t feel irrepara­ble, because I know some­thing is being restored beneath the sur­face. It’s tak­en me five decades to see that a cre­ative life is a spi­ral, cir­cling from qui­et input to out­ward expres­sion, from growth to deep rest. 

So now I rest. I tap dance. Play my gui­tar. Read lots of fic­tion. Play in my art jour­nal, paint­ing, col­lag­ing, and dream­ing in a new way. I shall wan­der, gath­er, and com­post experience.

Because the rains will come, they always do. And with it, the words. Not despite the rest, but because of it.

See y’all in the fall.