Dormant

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that my New Year posts have featured bare trees and shrubs. I’ve posted pictures of the fuzzy pods on bare Star Magnolias, the bare red branches of coral bark maples, the tight round buds on dogwoods, and the peeling bark on birch trees. At first glance, so much of the landscape that surrounds us in January looks lifeless, but it is really only dormant.

 Scientists describe dormancy as the period in an organism’s life cycle when growth and development are temporarily stopped.  Dormant plants are not producing leaves or flowers or fruit. Dormant animals have halted most or all of their physical activity. But dormant plants and animals are not dead. They are resilient and full of life. 

Gardeners are very attuned to dormancy. Perennial plants respond to adverse environmental conditions like cold weather (and sometimes to drought) by going dormant. Dormancy conserves energy. The plant may look dead, but the core and roots of the plant are still living, storing energy for the future. Once conditions improve, the plant will pour that pent up energy into producing new leaves and supple young branches.

 I’ve been thinking a lot about dormancy. For a long time, I’ve thought of the pandemic as an unpleasant and anxiety-producing set of restrictions.  And it is indeed both of those things. It has felt like I’ve gone dormant—unable to produce much that is new.

I talk with coaching clients about reframing—about looking at some condition in life in a new way and reframing how we think about it. Reframing can free us to take healthier approaches to life’s challenges. Lately, I’ve been thinking about whether it might be helpful to reframe this practice of sheltering at home as something like a state of dormancy. Many of the things that would ordinarily consume my energy--new projects, community activities, time spent with loved ones—have been largely off-limits. It’s been helpful for me in recent weeks to think of the pandemic as a period when I’ve been able to conserve energy conserved so that when life resumes more normal rhythms, I can emerge from dormancy and pour my energy into producing my own equivalent of new leaves and flowers.

What do you think? How do you think about the state of dormancy? Is that a helpful way for you to think about this period in our collective lives?

Comfort and Joy

The other day I heated a can of potato soup and cracked open a bag of oyster crackers for lunch. I bought the oyster crackers in March during one of my prepare-for-the-pandemic shopping trips, and I had forgotten that they were stuffed into the back of the pantry.

 Oyster crackers are comfort food to me. My mother never bought them, but my grandmother kept them in a big glass jar within a child’s easy reach in a bottom cabinet, the same cabinet where she stored the cereal that my sister and I snacked on every time we visited her. I snacked on the oyster crackers, too. Mamaw also gave them to me when I was too sick to go to school, and I stayed with her.

As I ate my soup and munched the oyster crackers that I bought nine months ago for comfort, I thought about this strange and difficult year. For me, it’s been a year of loss—many kinds of loss.

I lost two of my dearest family members, including Mamaw. I lost a special friend who was the first person to welcome me into this neighborhood 24 years ago. A treasured former colleague died of Covid.

I lost the sense of safety and ease in moving around my community on a daily basis. I gave up travel plans. I lost opportunities to gather with family and friends, an especially painful loss at the holiday season. I lost concerts, art openings, and author readings at my local bookstore. So many of the activities that bring me joy are not safe right now.

 But in the face of all this loss there has been comfort and even joy. As my husband and I have joked several times this year, fortunately we enjoy each other’s company because we’ve had to spend a lot of time together. There has been comfort and joy in that, in sharing laughter and tears. I’ve taken solace in mysteries and historical novels, in binge watching good television, and in lazy afternoons on the back porch. I’ve taken comfort and joy in Facetime and Zoom calls with friends and satisfying work with clients, in long walks and in flowers, trees, and goats, in chalk drawings on sidewalks and Christmas decorations, and in cooking and snuggling with the cat. There’s even been comfort and joy in remembering moments I shared with those lost loved ones.

While I tend to be a “glass-half-full” kind of girl, I’m not a Pollyanna. I know that all of us have endured many losses this year. There have been personal losses and collective losses. And many many people have suffered terrible hardships and losses much worse than my own.

We face many more months, maybe even a year, of pandemic uncertainty. There will be more losses, I have no doubt.

The other day, a friend posted this on Facebook:

Coronacoaster, noun: the ups and downs of a pandemic. One day you’re loving your bubble, doing work outs, baking banana bread and going for long walks and the next you’re crying, drinking gin for breakfast and missing people you don’t even like.

 Nine months into this pandemic, I’m definitely on the coronacoaster. I have lots of moments of grief, anxiety, and despair. There are days when I feel the losses of this year deeply. On those days, I look for comfort by cuddling on the couch with the cat and a book. And I try to remember to look for the joy in the ordinary moments of this shelter-at-home life. 

Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, writes,

Often, when a crisis hits, we are tempted to forgo joy and focus our attention only on dealing with the problem at hand. We rely on grit and tenacity to help us push through the difficulty and get to the other side.

Grit and tenacity may only carry us part of the way. Lee examines psychological research on the power of joy in hard times, and she notes, “Joy doesn’t need to stop in tough moments, and in fact, we’re usually better off if we allow a little joy into our struggle.”

 I’m not giving up on comfort and joy this pandemic year because I need them more than ever.

 I’d love to hear from you: what has brought you comfort and joy this year. Drop your thoughts in the comments.

Images by Jill Wellington and Manfred Richter from Pixabay

When Life Happens

Photo by Karin Endert

I'm pretty organized. That skill enables me to plan ahead, and most of the time, I can get the work finished in a timely manner.  But sometimes the best-laid plans go awry.  I had most of this newsletter ready a week or so ago with plans to get a blog post done this week.  And then life happened.  It's been a busy month with new clients and a number of workshops to facilitate. And then a tornado hit my town.  

No one in town was seriously injured or killed, and my husband and I are among the lucky ones. Our power is out, and we have an unfinished basement full of water.  There's going to be some annoying and time-consuming clean-up in the next week or so. But lots of our neighbors have trees on their houses or cars, so I'm not going to complain.

Once I found some wifi, I had planned to churn out a blog post today (Saturday), just in time for Monday's newsletter. But as I struggled to write, I stepped back to remember the advice I give my clients when life happens: give yourself a break, admit you can't do it all all the time, and move on.  

So I'm doing just that. Signing off and hoping you'll be satisfied with a cute picture of my cat.