Dormancy

I just wanted to take a moment to explore openness and how it applies to grief. We’ve moved, at least in the States, to place so much emphasis on keeping an open heart that we’ve neglected to value the opposite. To every yin, there is a yang and this is what keeps things in balance. 

After losing Bill, I struggled to keep my heart and my mind open. How could I, after losing the person I loved most in this world? But I kept forcing myself to be open and to talk and talk and talk some more about what happened. I also kept forcing myself to connect with other people who’d been through something traumatic, telling myself that I could help them in some way. Maybe this is true. And in hindsight, I needed to connect with others but I definitely gave too much of myself away and felt even more soul-sick after a while. 

Keeping an open heart is always important, but we would never advise someone about to have heart surgery to be out and open in the wild world of germs and infection. And this is a similar idea: protect that which is so fragile. You may feel, like I did, tender to the touch, as if you just got over a major illness and you’ve lost your physical strength. Listen to that. 

To say that the opposite of openness is closedness does this concept a huge disservice. It implies being shut off to love and life, which is not the point at all. Think of it rather as a dormancy. Any living being in nature needs time to shut down and to recharge. Since I work in wine, I can only draw from that: vines absolutely need dormancy to rest and recharge before the next productive season. If a winter is abnormally warm and they are denied dormancy, fruit either will not be born or it will be incredibly sub-par. 

For the first month or so, I just felt so physically raw that I needed that peace. Openness, at that time, would not have helped at all because it invites in other possible problems when you’re already bearing the most pain you can.

This is not to say you should be closed off to help and kindness. Think of it as taking the mental stance of curling up. Many mammals curl up when they need to protect themselves. This is the same idea, but it’s mental and emotional protection. 

We need to shift our thinking of openness to include dormancy as a vital part of overall health. After everything that has happened, I’ve needed to retreat from the world a bit and to rest and recover.