“There are lovers content with longing.  I’m not one of them” –Rumi

I like the sun.  I like the way it feels on my skin.  I like to breathe the warm air.  I like the way it feels in my lungs.  Even in the hottest most sweltering moments of Texas summers I never long for a bitter cold.  At least in the heat you can strip naked and still move.  In the bitter cold you can only hope for external coverings to layer, and to at best sit and shiver, immobilized. 

I will, however, in this post give some credit to the dead of winter.  Nico Vega sings, “Make it rain turns me out in the cold I die in the spring I sprout”.  Winter = death.  As I am typing this right now Texas and the rest of the nation are under a spell of cold that was born from a swirling vortex in the Arctic and blasted south across the continental US.  Nothing is moving in this.  Persephone is with Hades deep underground and Demeter is mourning her loss.  There are no crops to harvest at this time.

In farming there is a technique to make the soil fertile.  It is called the fallow system.  This is where you take your farm land, and you plow it, but then you stop.  You don’t plant seeds.  You don’t collect a harvest.  You just let the land sit and rest.  In doing this you sustain your crops year after year, making better food that is more nutrient rich and less prone to diseases.  It is a necessary cycle in the circle of life.

I think people can benefit from this too.  It is like a sort of taking of inventory of oneself.  An inward turn, a reflection, a period of silence.  Social media is a type of platform that is the opposite of this and highly addictive too because of the never-ending story of story, the pictures, the videos, the gossip.  It is a great joy to share amongst each other, and a seductive hunger that constantly needs to be fed, much like an active farming crop that needs constant sunshine and water to grow and thrive.  (You can even maintain a virtual farm online via the “Farmville” app.  But I digress).

I don’t want to feed it anymore.  I’ve been going strong for 5 years now on Facebook, and before that Myspace, where I loved announcing the random thoughts that percolated in my mind, and sharing the myriad of things on the myriad interests that I am constantly experiencing.  There is a sharing that happens in this, and that is the best part.  The part where you get to connect with dozens of people’s lives all at once, in a matter of minutes.

But what if you don’t do that anymore?  What if you don’t live life in a fractured sense anymore and just totally and completely immerse without any need to share or participate or give an opinion or thought or look at another’s life and do the same back to them either in the form of a “like” or thought in your own head about their moments (either known or assumed)?  You can go to a concert and see a rad show and keep it all to yourself and not share a video or picture or check-in?  I love sharing this stuff.  I love seeing other people’s pictures when they do the same.  But I also long to live life like 2004 when I experienced things and kept it all to myself because that way it was whole and not torn, not broken up by photo, or a declaration of What Is (status update—“Saw Rob Halford and man does that guy have some pipes!”), or some sort of expectation being produced by the dog and pony dance that can sometimes happen online (in so many cases all assumptions—this is the most tormenting part are the constant assumptions the mind forms when engaging online).

I want to expend energy another way.  This is my fallow field.  It doesn’t mean I die and stop existing but that I give a proper cycle to an even bigger system.  I want to not be broken up and fractured but focused and whole.  I want to go forth with the same passion and creativity that I hold deep in my chest but without the constant need for showing and telling or even just looking.  I want to write more in my paper journals, and write more on my blog, but not live my life in a divided series of check-in’s and likes and proclamations.  I want to meet more people (I love people—it’s why I enjoy working in sales) and engage with the whole person and not worry about adding them as a fucking friend for some fucking website where I can then go online and try and ‘understand’ them by reading their profile rather than just talking to them and listening to them, really listening to them, in real life which is what we had to do back in the not-so-distant-past.  I want to eat at a new restaurant and not worry about writing down the menu so that I can write an accurate review.  I want to taste the food without having to worry about thinking how I would describe the taste to others.  I want to create magic and adventures in my life on a grand scale and not have to be strapped down with recording every instance via photo for evidence of such—the Trail Of Heather.

It is almost selfish to think of disengaging from social media, like being the one to leave the town and never coming back.  Only I might come back.  But maybe not the same.  Hopefully not the same.  I want to taste life on a different level now, with a different focus on the 24 hours that we are given in a day (since we can’t create more time I will need to do different things energetically with my time).  Let’s see what this fallow field will produce from such, let’s see what will be born from this new pattern of life.  I am ready to create, and give birth and grow.  In new ways.  In the new year.  With the new cycles.  In the cold I die and in the spring I sprout…