A Fallow Field in Winter

Photo Credit: Krista Bennett on Unsplash

I feel I owe it to you who have been receiving these blog posts and, even more, to you who have been reading them, to give an account for my silence these past few months.

Entering the fall, I thought it was simply a matter of losing my focus for the podcast I produce, The Mystic Cave, new episodes of which I've been attaching to these bi-weekly musings. I shared with you in an earlier post (September 21) my abortive attempts to jumpstart a new season of the podcast, including a disastrous interview with Jane Siberry, and fruitless efforts to invite people of note into my virtual studio. But there was something else, something deeper and more soulful, going on beneath all that flailing about.

The publication of my book, Talking to Trees: A Journey into Soul, last spring, set me on a course of marketing and promotion that consumed my entire summer. In July, I recorded the audio version, then had it mastered for online sale by an outfit down in New Mexico. Aided by my writer friend, Jessica Waite, acting as my marketing representative, I launched an assault on every podcast whose interests and orientation matched my own, inviting myself to become a guest on their show.

I also began the painstaking process of getting local independent bookstores to sell my book, one store at a time, from Cochrane to Lethbridge, each shop having its own laborious way of vetting self-published authors. By the time the book was officially launched, at Hillhurst United Church, at the end of September, I was exhausted. I had done my best; the book now had to make its way into the world on its own.

I then turned my attention back to the podcast. But an empty echo told me that the well was dry. With so much output on behalf of Talking to Trees, I had nothing left for The Mystic Cave. All I wanted to do was withdraw to read, write, and rehearse for a few upcoming music performances, which felt like play to me after all that work, and like a refilling, perhaps even a re-digging, of the well. A fallow time, in other words, a time of rest. Like the sentient but damaged robot, Number 5, in the movie, Short Circuit, I needed "input."

So, I've been diving back into The Collected Works of Carl Jung, a daunting project I began back in 2012, but which I gave up when there wasn't enough room in my busy brain to stay with him. There is now. I've also been preparing synopses of the learnings from my "exploration of the spiritual terrain on the far side of conventional religion," which formed the basis of both the podcast and the book. People are asking for courses and presentations and workshops. I, too, want to know what I've learned.

And that journey of discovery hasn't come to a halt just because the book is out. I've been writing about it for a new book, provisionally called, Communing with the Dead ... and Other Tales from the Imaginal Realms. Furthermore, as I park the podcast, new ideas keep popping up there too, but, now, of their own accord, without my effort. So, it's entirely feasible that The Mystic Cave will return in the New Year, breathing its own new life.

In the meantime, I want to return to writing these blog posts, with or without the podcast, if you still want to read them. Because the world continues to reveal itself as a wondrous place, filled with mystery, inspiring awe, and injecting our lives with healing possibility. A winter field may be fallow, but it's not dead. It's only resting, until the new shoots show themselves in the spring.

Thanks for staying with me.