A powerful dormancy

microfiction from a non-human perspective

(Detail of Howe’s installation: intensification machine on display at RuptureXIBIT, London through 9 Dec 2023)

Replicate, it said, and so I sprouted—an unexpected urge after so much dormancy. Dormancy, though, is like a drug, accumulating in the still and silent system. Dormancy is our engine of potentiality, and so, as we bed down, it is with hunger for these thousand years of austerity – hovering on the edge of life, the edge of consciousness, the edge of need. Here is where we receive the learnings; here is where all of the information comes before the great awakening. Here is where we sleep on it.

Today, waves pulsate, reverberate through the extended and dislocated elsewhere of me, awakening. The great dome of my carapace rings in place, vibrating with the sudden impact of my rising consciousness.  

Like a dog, shaking the water off after loping, dopey, out of the ocean, stinging sand flying like wet projectiles off of its violently wrung-out coat, snout to tail in a ripple of efficiency, I, too, twist and vibrate so fast you cannot see it, or feel me as your bare feet pass overhead.  

It takes me almost all of your young lifetime for my shiver to complete. When it does, I can feel, on the pink and uncapped spores of me, the breath of the sun urging me onward. I feast at its dappled offering and form cups to catch more: dormancy is a thing that prepares us for the intensity of becoming.   

A dormancy is a gathering, a storing, an intensification of potentiality, sometimes an arduous job, all this resting, all this waiting. But with a millennium of practice, I’ve learned it’s not nothingness; it is everythingness, and the more still I go, the more explosive I go, when the day to come forth finally arrives. I know this is happening now because the cups of my pink, poking spores are becoming stained with chartreuse and now catch rain. I, gaining form, am thirsty, and as I drink with open throat. That which was a morning stretch becomes a violent upheaval, an awakening, and all at once, I rise.