I’ve noticed the fields lately. They seem bigger than usual, wide open and brown. The farmer’s have been busy ploughing, tending and preparing the ground for seed. It looks as if all is barren, they don’t please my eye and seem to cause some kind of disruption to my soul as if their brown, soily state resonates with something deep inside of me. 

I don’t quite know what words to put to this discomfort, to how the brown earth stirs me, to how much I want to see the fields green again and full of life. I know this process is necessary and it must happen every year even though I don’t recall it from previous seasons. These ploughed, brown fields seem to be a mirror to my own soul. Perhaps part of me feels ploughed, dug into and turned over. Maybe I don’t like this disruption that dislodges the rubble, removes what doesn’t serve and prepares me for new life. 

It looks like death because it is death. The field has given its harvest, it has died to what was, that season now over. It rested awhile through the depths of winter and is now being made ready to repeat the process. 

Die, prepare, seed, life, die, prepare, seed, life. 

This resonates with me, this dying in order to live. I can see ways in which I’m dying again right now to things that I’ve been holding on to. I know the invitation is present yet again to surrender to the process and in so doing to make way for new seeds and then new life. It seems this is the unending process of being human. If I am willing, the constant and myriad ways I’m invited to die, will never end. I’m sometimes wearied by it and then I remember to yield and find myself falling into deeper places of contentment, joy and peace. I find myself less attached, letting go more easily. Life this way is more oily and less stuck, less jarring. 

I don’t always like this process of dying, perhaps the fields sometimes just want to be left alone too. I don’t like the feelings that can come with dying, the discomfort and the ever-present invitation to trust a God I cannot see, but I may as well get on with it as it’s the way things seem to work. It’s the only way I know of that keeps offering me the wide open space I need in which I can be fully human and fully alive. 

In the same way that the seasons roll around and the farmers set their rhythms to them, knowing when to plough, prepare, seed and harvest, I’m maybe – just maybe – learning to let myself be the field completely in the farmer’s care. 

Notice where you feel ploughed over and dug into

Are you aware of a sense of disruption to your soul?

What is dying in you? Can you allow this death?

Is new life apparent?