My friend Marie died two weeks ago. While she was 87, her death was sudden and unexpected. Of course, that is the circumstance of death more often than not: an unwelcome surprise foisted on us without warning or advance notice. And so, every time we have that internal shock, and we wish for their return.
I want Marie back in her chair around the big table in my coffee shop, with her cup of strong assam steeping. I have a wave of dis-ease when I walk by her house and see her car still in her driveway. I scroll through my facebook message exchanges with Marie, hoping to see the green button by her name. I wish I had asked her to show me her pie crust secret. And I wish she had finished sewing together her 26-knitted square afghan, each square unique and intricate, months of labor, pattern analysis, and discussion.
Three days after Marie died, I was restlessly sad, crawling under my own skin, intensely uncomfortable in this fresh grief, anxious about my husband’s mortality, and my own. I needed to do something, anything. I paced back and forth in my kitchen and noticed the amaryllis on the windowsill. Dormant for more than two years, the sprouting of green pointed tips a few weeks prior caught me off guard. I assumed the plant was dead but I couldn’t bear to part with it, so there it sat, a bleak bulb in a bare black plastic pot.
The cycle of dormancy and new life echoes our own human existence. That awareness came quickly as I was scooping potting soil into the much larger pot. I was reluctant to make this transfer at all, for fear of killing the plant, but I also knew that its old environment, safe and nurturing, was now confining and constraining and claustrophobic, and would prove to be lethal without intervention. I released it from its rootbound restricted existence, two-and-a-half foot leaves precariously swinging with the transfer to the new pot. Instantly the leaves had the appearance of the body-wide relaxation that comes after a juicy yawn with a full-body stretch. I added some water, settling the bulb into its new potting soil cushion.
That Marie died in November, as did my father decades ago, and my first love’s mother, and my brother-in-law, brings Death to the fore in the grey skies and bare trees and cold rain. I do hold a belief that, as Anne Lamott says, “Death is just a change of address.” While I don’t find comfort in the notions of heaven or hell, I do believe that beings might just be recycled over and over, as many ancient wisdom traditions teach. We come back as many times as we need, in whatever form, to learn all the lessons that we need to learn.
Dormant comes in may forms. Death, but also boredom. Sleep, but also catatonia. We humans have our own cycles of dormancy and rebirth. There are times we are comfortable. We are at an equilibrium, free from being rocked by external intrusions. Usually, those periods are short. Either we have change imposed upon us by circumstance, or we become bored. We find ourselves feeling constrained and confined. There is ease in familiarity, to be sure, but we aren’t meant for that kind of existence long-term. We have always been nomadic beings, both in body and in mind.
Discovery is born of constraint. When routines become ruts, growing height in the walls that limit our views of untrodden wilderness, the familiar closes us in. We become bored and restless. We long to move out of these deep ruts and toward bushwhacking through fresh ground, finding the views and the meadows on the other side of the pine woods that allows us to see a horizon ahead. So, we move house, we make a new friend (a scary task in late middle-age), or we rearrange the living room furniture to find some newness on a small scale. Taken to extremes, we refer to these changes as a “midlife crisis”, an apt time during which many of us notice our neural ruts more keenly.
It is an interesting conundrum to consider that while we are creatures with a need for movement built into our genetic code, our brains simultaneously prefer a familiar pattern. This bit of dissonance can be easily noticed in our various unwanted behaviors. It is difficult to cease the behavior, be it drinking or overeating, because our brain is wired to keep us safe, and safety comes in familiarity, so we maintain these unwanted behaviors simply because they are familiar. Put another way, we drink, or gamble, or scroll our way into dormancy.
Are you finding yourself to be dormant? Living in auto-pilot mode? Struggling to escape unwanted habits? If this blog resonates with you, reach out today.
So beautiful 💖