In the South, you can drive down the same road and see both of them… Spanish moss and kudzu… sometimes on the same stretch of trees. Both draped. Both familiar. Both so much a part of the landscape that most people don't look twice.

But up close, everything is different. One takes nothing. One eventually collapses what it climbs. One rests and receives. One covers until you can no longer see the shape of what was there.

This final episode in the Dormancy Is Not Death series holds both plants in the same hand. And the question I keep coming back to, the one I'm asking myself and asking you, is simple: which one am I tending right now?

Because the honest middle most of us are actually living in is that we have some of both. There are places in our lives where we've genuinely learned to rest and receive. And there are places where something has been growing longer than we intended and covering more than we realized.

I also want to tell you about the bald cypress, the tree that drops every needle in winter and looks completely, entirely dead, and why it might be the most important image in this whole series for anyone who's standing in their own stripped-bare season right now.

This episode ends with three questions. They're not homework. They're an honest invitation to look at your own landscape and tell yourself the truth about what you see.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
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