Soil holds many analogies for renewal and growth. Today, I’m sharing an excerpt from my book, Circuit Train Your Brain. Thinking about dormancies is part of my yearly reset. Perhaps it will help you, too:
Today, make plans to get some literal dirt under your nails. Whether you are a gardener or not, being exposed to the earth is good medicine. There’s evidence that the composition of soil is beneficial to our mental health.
While you may not heard of a soil microbe called Mycobacterium vaccae, it has the power to shift your brain chemistry. It has been shown to trigger mouse brains to produce serotonin (thereby acting as an antidepressant). According to a study performed at the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, mice exposed to it were shown to have less anxiety, learned better and ran through mazes faster and more competently.
If you don’t have a garden, go to the park. Dig a bit in a space that has already been cultivated. Scoop up a bit of the good earth and smell it. Go to a conservatory. Hang out with the plants.
To get my green fix when I was a single mother and my daughters were young, we adopted a planter located downtown through a program sponsored by the chamber of commerce. We spent time planting and tending a patch of ground in the heart of the city. The girls had fun and we all enjoyed the time we spent together.
Also, consider this: you’re not dead. You’re dormant.
In Chicago, the landscape in the midwest is bleak and windswept during the winter. No vegetation grows and the trees are shut down for the season. As cliche as it sounds, when I’m wading through snow drifts on my way into the bus stop, spring (and its soft green, spongy new grass) seems a million months away. It’s as though it will always be Winter.
Of course, this isn’t true.
Sometimes we go through dormancies in our lives, but they can be more difficult to detect: Fallow periods where our productivity seems to plummet. Quarters where we post no new sales. If you’re an artist, writing, painting, composing or other artistic Muses seem to have taken a vacation, leaving our creativity to atrophy.
Whenever I think that I am not being productive or everything seems “bare” around me, I think of hydrangeas. If you’ve ever seen a dormant hydrangea, you know what I mean. It looks like a dried up bundle of sticks (and more than one gardener has mistakenly thought that the shrub in this state to be dead).
Nope.
Not dead. Sleeping. Conserving energy. Planning for spring.
Hydrangeas need the season of dormancy to bloom and flourish. A friend of mine, who lives in Southern California, once sighed, “I wish I lived where you do so that I could grow hydrangeas in my garden.” I laughed in response. This, from a woman who has bird of paradise that cost $12 a stem at my co-op clogging the meridian strips on her roadways. How’s that for perspective?
Without our harsh and brutally cold winters, the hydrangea would never achieve dormancy. Therefore, the hydrangea bush literally cannot produce flowers without environmental adversity.
Unrelated to flowers, but related to dormancy, is a scene from the movie, The Princess Bride that always makes me laugh: It takes place in the hut of Miracle Max, who revives The Man in Black (Westley in disguise) from being mostly dead.
“‘Mostly’ dead is ‘slightly alive,’” explains Miracle Max.
When you are experiencing dormancy, you are slightly alive. Focus on your strengths; take the long view to achieving your goals and stick with it.
For extra credit: start an indoor herb garden on your window sill. Tending the plants—watching the miracle of mute, brown earth release a neon green, tender shoot and nurturing it to wholeness will add to your quality of life in more than one way. I promise.
Say aloud to yourself: “I am worthy of good things.”
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