A story about successful amateurism.

The Core Stories | A story about successful amateurism.

In modern-day English, an “amateur” is someone inexperienced in a particular pursuit; a person who performs a hobby without professional skills. (You know this already, unless your vocabulary is, let’s say, amateur.)

It’s a word often used with a jeer. It’s not a label most of us wear with pride. We’d rather be professionals, specialists, gurus, experts — the words we scatter across our LinkedIn profiles, praying people will take us seriously and see us as successful.

But the word “amateur” dates back to 1784, with its roots in French and Latin. What it originally meant was “lover.” It was used to describe someone enthusiastic and passionate about a pastime, with no negative connotation and with expertise rendered irrelevant.

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A story about dormancy.

The Core Stories | On the beauty of dormancy.

Perennial plants — the kind that re-bloom from the same roots, year after year after year — spend winter in a state of dormancy. It’s a survival strategy that equips them to endure weather conditions that are unsuitable for growth.

Dormancy is triggered by subtle cues, from decreasing temperatures to shortened daylight hours to reduced rainfall. It tells the plants to slow their cell activity and prepare their soft tissues for frost, as the green leaves and flowers wither and appear to die.

But they’re only resting underground. When the climate warms again, growth restarts from stored-up energy. The process is called “budbreak.”

I had never heard that term before researching this perennial plant magic. How beautiful is it? Budbreak?

We talk about blossoming and blooming. We talk about sprouting, the start of something new.

But we don’t talk enough about budbreak, the rebirth of something that had seemingly perished. We don’t talk enough about dormancy, the rest that is so often instrumental before any resumed growth.

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