Resilience. I have been pondering resilience often these days, wondering if I will be able to conjure this state of being as we head into a pandemic winter. Resilience…the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties…toughness…the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape…elasticity. Instead of objects or substances, I have been thinking about human resilience. Predominantly, mine. And the resilience of those I love and whose lives brush up against mine. Also, the resilience of our nation and the resilience of our world. It seems to me that we are living in days that are calling us to pull from some deep well, perhaps yet unseen or known, to fill our lungs with the sweet, strong breath of resilience.

Looking around I have been trying to observe those with seemingly more resilience than I feel I can muster. Those that seem to be able to be more optimistic than my mind can fathom. In the density of harsh words and inescapable untruths that fly toward us daily, I have a desire to slather on the power of resilience like the sunscreen that keeps my skin from burning in the now waning days of summer. I long for the ‘capacity to recover quickly from difficulties’ for it to fill my veins and pump its way into my heart. A heart that feels so weighed down with uncertainty that ‘elasticity’ seems to evade me. My sense is that I am not alone in this feeling, this desire.

In her popular memoir Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama writes: “Grief and resilience live together.” She describes how she has learned this over and over in her life, as a human being and in her role in public life. Each day we see the faces of those who are caring for people whose lives have been affected by COVID-19. Those who work in hospitals, nursing homes and in various health care settings are confronted daily with grief on so many levels. And also resilience. Families whose lives have been upended by this virus, whose jobs and home life has been changed forever are swimming in a sea of sorrow. And also resilience. This week children, teachers and parents are grieving the ways their fall once looked as school resumed and dreams of what the year would be like are put on a shelf until some yet to be known time. Daily doses of a longing for what was and what might be forms into a communal grief that holds us, holds the whole of the world. 

And yet. And yet. Arriving at the cabin this week, I witnessed a sight that somehow spoke to me of a resilience that rises out of discarded hopes.Staring up at me from a woodland path, a sunshine shape held space. My sister-in-law had pulled out a marigold stalk and thrown in out onto the path of the woods, discarding it from its pot near the cabin. But this blossom was not yet done with its living. It found a place to burrow into the soft soil and grew anyway under the branches of a birch tree. Its brilliant yellow face lighted up the greens and browns of a dying, autumnal landscape saying, “I am not done yet. I have more life in me.” Seeing this gave me such joy and hope. Resilience was alive and well and offering itself to all who would see.

In her poem, Optimism, Jane Hirschfield writes:
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.

Resilience. It may be difficult to live into all the time over the next months. But perhaps if in our socially distanced circles one or two of us can muster it on one day and two others on another and so one and so on, we can birth enough elasticity and capacity for tenacity to see us through. When ‘finding the light newly blocked on one side’, may we all find the strength to ‘turn in another’ until resilience lives in us and through us. 

It is my hope and prayer.