Mental Crop Rotation
When farmers grow the same crop too many years in a row, it can leave their soil depleted of minerals and other nutrients that are vital to the health of their fields.
To avoid this, farmers will often alternate the crops that they grow because some plants will use up different minerals (such as nitrogen) while other plants replenish those minerals. This process is known as âcrop rotation.â
So the next time you find that you need to step away from a project to work on something else for a while, donât beat yourself up for âquittingâ that project. Give yourself permission to practice âmental crop rotationâ to maintain a healthy brain field.
Because Iâve found that when that unnecessary guilt and pressure are removed from the process, a good mental crop rotation can help you feel more energized and invigorated than ever once youâre ready to rotate back to that project.
: A crucial part of crop rotation is that the field is let fallow sometimes. You plant whatâs called a âcover cropâ, which is something you donât expect to harvestâ itâs there for its roots to hold the soil in place, and often itâll be whatâs called a nitrogen-fixer, i.e. a plant that can pull nitrogen out of the air and fix it into the soil with its roots (but sometimes it wonât, sometimes itâs really just there to shelter the soil surface), and then youâll till in that cover crop, or let the frost kill it and the stalks lie as mulch, and then youâll rotate productive crops back into that field the next season.Â
Itâs important, though, to understand that during the fallow period, no nutrients are removed from that ground, and nothing is expected of it. Whatever the land grows then, it keeps, and it gets tilled back in or decomposes in place, to return its energy to the earth.
Weâre not allowed, in our current society, to just let our minds be fallow for a bit, to produce nothing for export, to make nothing that can be sold. But itâs part of good land stewardship, to give every field time when it doesnât need to give you anything back.Â
So yes, grow and produce different things from time to time, rotate them around your mind and exercise different mental muscles, take different things from your creative processes, yesâ but also, give yourself a fallow spell now and again, and let the field of your mind grow things for itself to keep, to break down and save for later.Â
Positive mental health AND agriculture??!?
*slams reblog button*
