Fertilization

Consider dormancy. The winter. The time when some suffer from what is called seasonal depression. Also called seasonal affective disorder. And we know that the chicken definitely came first in that case.

Dormancy is the time when all that is not needed is dropped and everything gets colder and looks bare, but there is so much more than what we see. Dormancy is relief. It’s the dropping of struggle. It’s the leaves falling to the earth and their death giving life to roots.

I consider how the two are tied together. Driving. My phone secreted away in the console next to me. I remember when I quit smoking, how I tried everything. Brent will tell you how he took a video of me outside of Ms. Mae’s with eleven lit cigarettes in my mouth. And Glen will tell you how I picked up the butt of a Kool cigarette from the ashtray where I worked at American Luxury Limousines. I chewed gum. I begged. I prayed.

Then I rode with Jay on the Pacific Coast Highway. PCH they call it. Butts they call shorts in Orleans Parish Prison. Now they call it Orleans Justice Center, but we all know it’s still OPP. 

Everybody wants to call something something.

This is not a tangent. This is all connected. We want to label the mystery and rob it of its essence. Don’t get me wrong. Our hearts want, even need, mystery. It is our minds that crave protection. Our minds create problems and then try to fix them. Our minds like to be busy. Our minds do not like dormancy. 

On that ride along the PCH in December of 2014, Jay told me, “Whether you know it or not, every time you pick up a cigarette, you are blocking an emotion that has some reason for coming. Maybe good. Maybe bad. Maybe in between.” 

I think he even said that it may be nothing. I have not smoked since January of 2015. 

The reason I mention all of this is that in my truck, in the cold of winter, I find myself with the heat on. I find myself so hot that when I step outside it’s a shock. And it’s not even that cold. I’m not present to what is. 

And while this phone sits in the console, it calls me. Dozens of thoughts come. I want to know how long before Cedar Bay Cherry fruits. I want to know how it does in pots. I want to know the weather for the next week. I want to know the events happening in New Orleans this evening. I want to grab onto certainty. I want to ask chatgpt why I write the same thing over and over. 

The phone is the new cigarette. The internet is millions of different experiences. We’re lost in the very space in which we exist. We reach into machines filled with endless answers but are asking the wrong questions.

Maybe the SAD comes because we have lost the practice of letting everything fall, of being with questions that can’t, or don’t need to, be answered immediately. Maybe dormancy is a journey that all of us can take.

So I wonder what might fall from my life and how best might I see that not every seed needs to break the surface, that we have 60,000 thoughts a day. My mission this winter is to let ninety-five percent of them fall. They're repetitive anyway. 

And who knows what gifts lie on the forest floor of the heart, waiting to be fertilized by what falls from the mind.