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A story about a dog and a dogwood.

August 10, 2016

The Core Stories | A story about a dog and a dogwood.

I arrive at my childhood home in Maryland for a two-week visit at the same time as a sinkhole starts stewing in the street outside the house, eking pools of yellow-green murk into the gutter. The sanitation department sends its team of night workers one weekday evening, and at 9pm, they upturn the earth with noisy trucks and tools, seeking the source of the leak so they can sew it back together again.

We’re forbidden from turning on our faucets while they toy with the pipes, so my dad drives to the store to buy plastic bottles of water. Dirty dinner dishes are left to languish in perilous piles in the sink.

Later, we assemble on the couch, attempting to relax: my younger sister here for the summer in between two years of grad school, my parents, and me, with our senile dog whining angstily around us. Our family tree is temporarily replanted, but with the surrounding ground rumbling and crumbling and caving in.

Every so often, we take turns traipsing barefoot into the front yard, asking questions. The construction men just keep saying, “Soon.” Still, we peek out the blinds at the trucks and bulldozers and deep holes in the gravel and grass. It reminds me of the way New Yorkers — myself included — tend to stand at the edges of subway platforms and crane impatient heads down the tunnels to look for the lights of an emerging train. Rationally, we know we’re going to have to wait several more minutes, like the boards say in their red digitized numerals, and we know our yearning can’t force time forward. But that doesn’t stop us from ferreting for some hint, however small, of progress.

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A story about getting to the roots.

July 23, 2016

The Core Stories | A story about getting to the roots.

I spent the second weekend of July at a yoga retreat. In addition to practicing vinyasas and meditations, we learned some chanting, which is a fancy term for singing Sanskrit phrases whose spellings are unfathomable and meanings incomprehensible. There’s one particular tune that got stuck fluttering between my skull and rib cage, so I Googled the words. Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu: May all beings everywhere be happy and free.

After the retreat, I took a train up to Vermont, where I spent two weeks volunteering at an art and wellness center with a vast organic garden. I wrenched weeds from the soil and greeted glimmering earth worms and bumblebees and gem-winged beetles. I picked blueberries and currants, harvested garlic and oregano, and hauled woodchips up the hill to expand the paths between the different patches where green vines outstretched like giddy limbs.

At the end of each day, I was splotched with dirt, soggy, frizzy-haired, sun-spent — and smiling. Every evening shower was the best shower of my life, even though I was never able to remove the brown grit from underneath my nails. My forearms remain etched with thorn scratches, and there’s a blue bruise on my bicep where I got punctured by a wild rose. My knees got stung by nettles twice over.

Still, while I worked, scattering droplets of sweat like glitter, I couldn’t seem to stop humming that Sanskrit blessing under my breath instinctively. Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu.

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A story about blooming in the back-and-forth.

March 19, 2016

If there was a moment when spring sprang, I missed it. It must have happened while I was out of town last week for my grandfather’s funeral, mourning his death while the earth burst to life.

Strange, to think that I was draped in black while the trees donned frilled pink tutus and petaled taffeta hats. Now, as I settle back into my typical routine, still processing a goodbye buried deep underground in silent stillness, the crocuses are sprouting from the same soil, glimmering with giddy newness.

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A story about dormancy.

February 2, 2016

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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