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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.
[Big aside. I finished about half of this post and was editing the photo layout when I lost the entire post. Zap! Pooff! Every bit of it gone. And you know, when that happens I am sure that what I wrote before was probably the most brilliant, thought provoking, sweet post I’d ever written. So, in the spirit of reconstruction, I’m doing it all again! How did I start???]
