Fallow Field or Pregnant Pause?

Often our greatest gifts in life emerge from our darkest moments and experiences. Silver linings within sinister storm clouds might not reveal until sunlight re-emerges. Blessings emerge from catastrophes. The yin-yang of life occurs naturally, without pausing, as opposites flow from and into each other, an essence replicated in T’ai Chi Chih weight shifts.

TCC replicates Nature’s circular flow in repetitions of the seasonal cycles of Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. What season are you in? Are you experiencing the new beginnings of Spring? The lushness of Summer? The release of Fall? The fallowness of Winter in which landscapes appear to sleep in barren stillness?

Fallow (“plowed and harrowed but left unsown for a period of time to restore its fertility”) can look and feel like nothing is alive. Always, Spring arrives with buds miraculously popping through tree bark and blades of grass pushing up through asphalt. Have you ever experienced a fallow season? Is Winter’s stillness better described as a fallow field or pregnant pause? Do we experience only one fallow season in a lifetime?

My “Life So Far Crops Fields” began going fallow, again, in Fall 2018. My husband was diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer. His healing process involved significant dietary changes, best supported by my choice to step away from my eight-year-old cake business. The decision was a no-brainer, even though my decision created an unanticipated psychic shift.

In the yin is a touch of the yang and vice versa. Raymond’s cancer, surgeries and optimum health protocols invited me back into a more consciously committed relationship with my TCC practice and our TCC Community.

My fragile sense of identity reached a tipping point when my “baby” sister Ankie (Ann Carol) succumbed to ovarian cancer in October 2019. Death is natural to life. However, this one was different; she was the youngest of five siblings and the first to die. Until Ankie’s passing, I’d never wailed in grief. I’d never sat silently inert in a chair for three consecutive days with no desire for movement. Days turned into weeks, weeks turning into months, of feeling lost and stuck in darkness.

Like a fallow field, there was no trace of any previous crops with any of the defining features of my garden. No cotton, no corn, not lettuce, no lilies and no ability to comprehend the complexity of the moment.

Eventually an urge emerged, recognizing the necessity of surrendering to one of life’s most profound processes and disconnecting from the self-defeating need to be in control – like releasing wrist tension in TCC practice. I was ready to release all desires to direct my life’s path and yield to the Chi’s flow during movements and in any residual need to know, understand or anticipate future weight shift.

Like a wave imperceptibly shifting, the inaction of “allowing” revealed a series of Chi “dots” leading to unanticipated connections with three Whole Body Integrative Health physicians at the Atlanta Veteran’s Administration Hospital. Coronavirus-induced brakes brought my VA security clearance process to a screeching halt, preventing on-site volunteering. Surprisingly, VA counselors and cancer care staff at the Medical College of Virginia requested for themselves weekday mini-TCC sessions on Zoom.

Allowing my fields to be stripped bare proved necessary to discovering the truth of Who and What I am as an Uncarved Block. Letting go of every hat, role and expectation that’s ever been a part of how I’ve identified my ego created a deep, dark hole. Might that have been the yin, with a drop of yang resting in stillness, waiting to align and flow into perfect balance and wisdom at the perfect moment?

A full and complete weight shift can be an indescribably sacred gift.

As I write this, we are a nation and planet of mostly homebound people, each having different experiences of an unseen foe. More than ever, practicing yinning and yanging, connecting with breath and tan t’ien, and flowing with Chi remains the best way to protect our mental, physical and spiritual health. Fear cannot infiltrate our precious serenity in the midst of chaos.

We might be forever changed as a result of our collective fallow fields. Yet from the stillness, from the yin, the creative, positive expansion of yang flows … and carries us from what was, to what can be, to what is possible within the Uncarved Block.

PS: Raymond’s post-surgery CT scan was clear!