Synonyms for fallow: uncultivated, unploughed, untilled, unplanted, unused, undeveloped, dormant, resting, empty, bare, virgin.

When we open up the fallow ground of our lives or help others to break open theirs, we are groundbreakers.

‘Leave it all, and let your self just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness.  You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells and mountains that you will rediscover, territories which have been buried under well meaning but dead names.  To go beyond confinement is to discover yourself.’*

‘I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease … observing a spear of summer grass. […] My respiration and inspiration … the beating of my heart … the passing of blood and air through my lungs.’**

At some point in our pasts, we have left the lands we are meant to explore for our tame inside worlds.  Walt Whitman escapes the perfumed houses and rooms that can intoxicate for the odourless (fresh) atmosphere of the outdoors that is for his mouth forever.   Now he’s able to closely notice both the natural world and himself within it: ‘I celebrate myself.  And what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.’**  This oneness of our outer and inner worlds, of me and you, Whitman invites us to experience first hand.

This first-handedness is our witness, is our groundbreaking.

‘There is a profound relationship – a love affair really – between curiosity and wholeheartedness.’^

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(^From Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)