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/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/

If you've driven through the South, you know the image… entire treelines swallowed whole, every individual form buried under a mass of relentless green. That's kudzu. And I think most of us have some version of it growing in the interior landscape of our lives.

Here's the part that I couldn't shake when I started researching this: kudzu wasn't snuck in. It was invited. Celebrated, actually. The U.S. government paid farmers to plant it in the 1930s because it looked like a solution to a real problem. By the 1950s it was classified as a weed. By the 1970s, a federal pest. What was subsidized and welcomed became what devoured the landscape.

That's the episode. Because the things that do the most damage in our lives are rarely the things we chose in obvious rebellion, they're the things we welcomed in because they looked like solutions. The coping mechanism that made total sense in the season we adopted it. The way of thinking about ourselves that started as protection and became a prison.

And here's the harder truth I had to say out loud first. You can deal with the vine all day long. Cut it, name it, make a commitment. But if you don't deal with the root, it simply waits and resends. The kudzu root goes seven feet deep and weighs four hundred pounds. The vine is just evidence. The root is the conversation.

This one's a little uncomfortable. But I think it's the kind of uncomfortable that's actually really good for us.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/

I was standing outside in Florida looking at the trees when it hit me. That gray, ghostly draping hanging off the branches stopped me in my tracks. And my first thought was: that's dead, right?

Wrong. Completely wrong. And what I found out next sent me down a rabbit hole that turned into this episode.

What most of us call Spanish moss isn't a moss at all. It's a flowering plant (an air plant) with no root system in the ground, no connection to the tree it rests on, and no need to take anything from what holds it. It draws everything it needs straight from the atmosphere. And those gray threads that look so lifeless? Wet them, and the whole plant turns green. The life was there the entire time. You just couldn't see it in the dry season.

I think a lot of us are in dry seasons right now. And I think a lot of us have been misreading them. We look at stillness and call it death. We look at dormancy and conclude something is fundamentally, permanently wrong. We do it to ourselves and we do it to the people we love.

So this episode is my case (biblically and botanically) for why that diagnosis is almost always wrong.

Dormancy is not death. And I think you need to hear that today.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/