Last Sunday, I was asked to talk about resilience at church. This is what I said.
I’d like to start with . . . Jane Hirshfield’s poem,
Optimism.
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.
I wanted to be a pillow, but if there is any lesson in the last 6 months, it is cultivating the tenacity of trees.
Talking resilience in medias res, I had no idea where to begin and what to tell.