Dormant

My lawn is brown.  Stubbly sticks of centipede grass appear dead.  This is disturbing to my four year old daughter.  I know in a matter of weeks green will come, along with growing and mowing of grass.  This is something I believe because I have seen it come to pass year after year.  She does not have this experience.      

Dictionary.com’s first six entries for dormant are

1.  lying asleep or as if asleep; inactive, as in sleep; torpid:  The lecturer’s shout woke the dormant audience.
2.  a state of rest or inactivity; inoperative; in abeyance:  The project is dormant for the time being.
3.  biology in a state of minimal metabolic activity with cessation of growth, either as a reaction to adverse conditions or as part of an organism’s normal annual rhythm
4.  undisclosed; unasserted:  dormant musical talent
5.  (of a volcano) not erupting
6.  botany temporarily inactive:  dormant buds; dormant seeds

Today, as with most of my musings, roots with questions.  How to explain dormant to a child?  My daughter has been in extreme physical growth for her entire four years of life.  A state of minimal metabolic activity has yet to happen to her!  She has no articulate memory of past year’s winter changing to spring.  Perhaps next year she will remember.  We older humans, as creatures of biology, certainly remember the normal annual rhythms of nature and have felt them within ourselves, too.  Times of growth, times of cessation, times of renewal.  In earlier periods greater numbers of people lived connected to the cycles of seasons and were perhaps more aware of their own changes parallel to those of the earth.  Now, as we have artificial light, alarm clocks, and twenty-four hour access to all sorts of foods from all over the world all year long we may not see clearly seasons of plenty and sparse except in the color of lawns and shrubbery.


What are the lessons of dormant?  Waiting and wondering are part of living.  We are participants in normal annual rhythm.  Finding oneself latent for a while is of benefit.  Allowing oneself to rest is natural and essential.  The dark times, the times that may look like sleep, can be a cessation of growth.  Cessation of growth is needed to store up for future growth and rest from past growth (sometimes painful).  We must at times be in the dark where there is knowledge to gain.  Being dormant is temporary.  Inactivity is not beneficial forever.


Brown to budding to blooming to buzzing to bearing fruit then dropping to dormant to go around again.  Eventually every life form, be it plant or person, is called forth to grow whether the child believes it will happen or not.   

Explaining Dormant

Tiny peeps from a back seat, why is the grass brown?

It is not dead, deep down it is alive in its roots, shoots waiting
waiting for the sun to warm us; we are tilted away now, our axis
leaning into the dark to let time teach change.  It will come
green again.