"Dormancy is the state of waiting. It is the duration of a restless season when verdancy pushes at the walls of a twig on a rose bush. It is the silent green pith of a branch that from the outside is indistinguishable from dead wood. We wake gradually from a period of sleeping; we wonder with growing awareness what neglect or infinite weariness put us under in the first place. The slow, thick sap which is our lifeblood begins to loosen in the veins; it begins to flow.

"People are 'meant to be green,' Hildegard von Bingen was fond of saying. The life in us is meant to seep through the pores of our skin and reach in the sun's direction. As seemingly harmless as He was, the unchanging, omnipotent God of my upbringing allowed no room in His world for evolution or ambiguity. And so I thought there was no room for it in my world either. But all that time, deep in its core, my body knew otherwise. When I cut back the dead wood, I find this: All along I've been drawn to both men and women, aroused by how firmly a woman plants her feet on the ground or by the concentrated passion with which a man looks out a window. All along I've loved a multifaceted God. God creates by connecting disparate parts, by embracing paradox, by making of opposites (light and dark, death and life, male and female) an ever-changing whole.

"I can feel it in my body."