Life & Therapy

Spring has a way of sneaking up on me every year.  Months go by without any green, and then all of a sudden, little plants are shooting up everywhere I look.  The earliest flowers have already been blooming for weeks: forsythia, daffodils, crocuses.  It is almost past time to get the early vegetable seeds in the ground- peas, spinach, beets, and more.  I race to catch up with the season, after months and months of forgetting about all of the plants in my garden.  Every spring, I am a bit stunned that the plants “come back.”  It seems impossible- they’ve been “gone” for months.  Some childlike, self-centered part of me does not believe that anything I can’t see above the ground actually exists.  But there is life under the surface!  The proof comes with this riot of plant life that gets going every spring.  This mass emergence is dependent on the dormancy of winter, when the plants rest undisturbed.  

Like the plants, we all have a lot going on under the surface.  Sometimes, our brains can’t understand that- if the brain can’t see it, it must not exist.  So, we can easily start digging up the roots of things that need to stay under our emotional soil, things that need a period of dormancy to gain energy for emergence.  It could be that we are in the gestation period of our creative process- we aren’t feeling inspired, and so we worry that we are never going to come up with a new idea again.  This happened for me just last week with this very blog.  

Rather than relaxing during a dormant time, we might get anxious, and try to force inspiration before it is ready to break through the surface.  Nothing comes to us, so then we start picking at ourselves, not getting the quiet time necessary for our ideas to formulate.  At some point, we can learn to let ourselves rest during our dormant spells, and perhaps focus on something else that needs our attention.  Then, when our inspiration is ready for expression, it will burst through the surface just as the plants do every spring.