Every week in my final semester of college, I walked a circuit around the campus, visiting the same 80 or so plants and documenting their growth, buds, leaves, and blossoms. It was a weekly assignment, called “Order of Bloom” for my spring Horticulture class.
When we began in February, with snow covering the Massachusetts landscape, I expected that all of the branches would be bare, and then at some point around the Equinox, things would bloom. But in those first few weeks, I was stunned to see the leaf buds on the willow branches, the slender yellow forsythia blossoms, the stirrings of rebirth even amidst a wintry landscape. Each week, another plant began its preparations for spring, pulling reserves up from its rootstock to push out new buds for leaves and flowers.
I felt like I’d been holding a divine secret when, around the end of March, my friends suddenly started exclaiming “It’s spring!” Yes, the daffodils were finally blanketing the hillside, but spring had been stirring for so long, unnoticed by most who walked on by without the practice and the knowledge of how to see it.
I think the same is true of resilience. Although in a certain situation or phase of life we may feel despairing or stuck or frustrated, under the layer of snow, the layer of icy impasse that encases our thinking or feeling, there are roots stirring, buds forming, life continuing on whether or not it is apparent.
The words of anthem today reflected this, reminding us that “Something is taking root, and stirring, deep beneath the snow.” These roots of resilience are ones that have been with us through many seasons, which we have knowingly or unknowingly cultivated through practice and attitude. These are the roots which make possible a spring in our lives.
That spring, the Order of Bloom project gave me the touchstone and the language I needed to search myself for signs of rebounding and resilience in moments of despair. Just this week, when I was feeling grumpy and discouraged, the whisperings of spring even amidst flurries of snow — with already-blossoming cherry trees, fresh, dewey air, and morning birdsongs — reminded me, mirrored to me, the well of my own strength and resilience.
It’s a nice thing, to be reminded of my inner calm by the world around me. But I have to admit I am also often worried, and afraid. In the face of climate change, climate chaos, spring may start to look very different than it does right now. In my lifetime, it’s possible that I may not be able to depend on spring, as I now know it, as the outward assurance that hope abounds in the world. Thinking of this, I sometimes feel overwhelmed, filled with preemptive grief for the world I love, that the next generations may not know.
On Thursday I had dinner with my friend Alex, who was visiting town. She leads environmental tours to the Arctic and Antarctic by boat, and she recently returned from Antarctica. She described to me the visceral sound of calving ice sheets — the loud groans, cracks, and splashes of icebergs being born — and how that sound became heartbreaking when she coupled it with her knowledge of the shrinking polar ice, the winters no longer cold enough to allow a steady buildup of the ice over time. She told me her sadness at the diminishing habitat for seals and narwhals to breed, and therefore the deep grief in the eyes of the Inuit people she’s met who have depended on those animals for their livelihoods and culture.
The depth of grief and suffering that climate change is already causing, and will continue to cause, is hard to measure and impossible to convey. It is already happening for the Inuit, and for farmers whose crops no longer withstand the lack of hard frosts, and for the people who live on islands rapidly being swallowed by the rising ocean, and for all of us looking to the future and unsure of what can be depended upon.
Of course, there are important actions we can and should take to help stop the worst global scenarios from happening, but that is not my topic today,
The question I have right now is not, what will we do to stop it? and it is not even, how will we survive it?, though these are both important things to ask ourselves. No. Given the ways we have depended on the seasons for food, livelihood, tradition, and spiritual renewal, my question is, where do we look for sources of resilience when what we’ve depended on before can no longer offer that grounding and that hope?
That is a question for the ages, one that our human family has grappled with longer than we know. It is not particular to buds in spring, or to climate change and rising seas, and that is actually a comfort to me, because it’s a familiar question.
The question is familiar to any of you who have lived through the death of a loved one you depended on,
you who have experienced the ending of a significant relationship,
you who have lost a job or been forced from your home,
you who have been targeted in spaces you once thought safe,
you who have become distanced from a faith tradition that formed you,
you who have faced changes in your own abilities and limitations.
Where do we look to for support, inspiration, healing, resilience when what we have depended upon is no longer dependable? What will remind me of the spring within when spring itself may be uncertain?
This is what I like to think of as varsity-level resilience, and I believe it requires finding deeper, more intrinsic sources of strength in order to rebound amidst the chaos and uncertainty. Ultimately, I believe it asks us to find that resilience which is inherent to the human spirit and which can be found, with practice, within ourselves, rather than wholly relying on outside sources for renewal.
In our reading this morning,[1] K. Sri Dhammananda, a renowned 20th-century Malaysian Buddhist monk, reflected, “These mighty waves of emotion carry us up, but no sooner are we up in the crest when, they fling us down. Hardly have we found some rest, before we are swept up again by the power of a new wave. How can we expect to gain footing on the crest of the waves?”
Dhammananda suggests we find it on the “the island of equanimity.” Equanimity — that stillness and calmness of mind and heart, fostered through a combination of perspective and compassion, which allows for steadiness without numbness.
Perspective is an essential component of equanimity. The perspective to see that the crests and valleys of our tumultuous lives exist in the context of a vast and ever-changing sea — this perspective can help mitigate some of the suffering caused by changes in circumstance, both on a personal level and in the world.
But rather than an island, I prefer to think of equanimity amidst the chaotic waves as a ship with a heavy and sturdy keel at the bottom, perhaps like the one where my friend Alex lives for polar summers. It may roll and tilt in the waves, but it is not toppled. You could say it possesses the equanimity to ride out the storm. But unlike the island, which is presumably stationary, not only does a boat have equanimity, it can also have direction, both centeredness and purpose.
In a brand-new book called Facftulness,[2] Swedish researcher Hans Rosling lays out why the perspective attained through facts can help us see that the world is not as bad as it seems to be. He names the barriers to seeing the good in the world — including our instinctive preferences for drama, urgency, and binaries. He uses facts to show that actually, despite the chaos and despair we feel, all over the world, people’s lives are drastically better than they were 100, 50, or even 15 years ago. For example, there are much lower rates of infant mortality, hunger, and poverty, and much higher rates of girls’ education, environmental protection, and longer lifespans. Given these trends, he advocates “cool-headedness” — which I might also call “equanimity.”
Dr. Rosling urges us to train ourselves to look for the truth of the good things happening in the world, but also says, “Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not talking about some trivial positive news to supposedly balance out the negative. I’m talking about fundamental improvements that are world-changing but are too slow, too fragmented, or too small one-by-one to ever qualify as news. I’m talking about the secret silent miracle of human progress.” (p. 51)
Much like I found inspiration and perspective from the signs of spring once I was trained to look for them, Dr. Rosling’s idea of Factfulness trains us to see incremental change that is indeed both uplifting and real.
For me, one of the most reassuring facts I’ve learned about humanity, which gives me both perspective and hope, is that we are among the most resilient and adaptable animals on the planet. Physically, our wounds heal faster, we have greater endurance, and can eat pretty much anything. We eat capsaicin for fun! Coupled with our capacity for abstract thinking, we possess an ability to survive and thrive in almost any condition. The expanse of heartbreak that people have lived through over the centuries renders me humbled, awe-struck, and re-energized to face the seemingly impossible. The true story of humanity is one of resilience.
In the powerful piece we watched earlier, called “Being Human”, [3] the artists of Climbing PoeTree muse about the emotions of the natural world. They wonder “if the soil thinks she’s too dark, if butterflies want to cover up their marks, if rocks are self-conscious of their weight, if mountains are insecure of their strength.” When I first saw this performance, I was struck by the absurdity of the question — anthropomorphizing aside, why would any butterfly or rock or mountain want to be anything other than the exquisite thing that it is??
Which, of course, is the point. If it’s absurd for a rainbow to be unsure of its colors, might it also be absurd for me to be unsure of my life, of my strength, of my resilience — these given aspects of my humanity?
Just as the rock can be sure of its weight, the river of its course, we, as humans, ought to be sure of our resilience. When I am feeling tossed and torn by the waves of life, what helps is to widen my perspective towards equanimity — reminding myself of the generations of lives that have culminated in mine, of difficult experiences in my own past, and of the people in my neighborhood, city, and world who have survived and thrived despite the challenges. If they have survived it, so can I.
Just as the practice of methodically searching for signs of spring helped me to see it beginning amidst the snow, practicing looking for signs of resilience and good in the world can help remind us of this innate quality in us. If your friends are like mine, sometimes this can be as simple as watching cute and inspiring internet videos of children and puppies. But this looking for good can also take the form of paying attention to successes like the recently-announced partnership in Portland to house and provide medical care for an additional 300 people experiencing houselessness, or like this month’s breakthroughs in curing HPV, or like this week’s commitment of billions of Euros from the European Union to address climate change.
This perspective can be comforting, and yet I don’t mean to say that we should ignore or hide the grief and suffering that does exist. We must hold both perspective and hardship at once, tending to one another’s’ loss and heartbreak with care even as we maintain hope.
When describing natural disasters in his book, Dr. Rosling says, “… when that camera pans to bodies being pulled out of the debris, my intellectual capacity is blocked by fear and sorrow…Claiming in that moment that things are getting better would be to trivialize the immense suffering of those victims and their families…The big facts and the big picture must wait until the danger is over. But then we must dare to establish a fact-based worldview again.” (p. 111)
Holding hope and grief together is what resilience is made of. It is not apathy or intentional ignorance or looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. It is acknowledging the hardship and, as is our specialty as humans, continuing on anyway, because we can and we must.
So what do we do when the things we depend on change? How for example, can we expect to face climate change amidst all of the terrifying predictions of what is to come? I believe that we must remain cool-headed, but also warm-hearted, cultivating our equanimity and compassion through our capacity to face and understand the big picture. As we face climate change we must hold equanimity while also working with purpose.
When my classmates and I undertook the Order of Bloom project, it only revealed the unfolding of spring once we were trained to look for the signs and when we paid attention, faithfully recording hope each week in the smattering of half-inch buds along a dark grey branch. We had to work to see the the changes that happened.
In these moments and in this uncertainty, we too must make a regular practice of working to see hope, of working for resilience and equanimity. It is not something that happens accidentally, passively, when we’re just walking by and cursing the cold. It happens when we gather together here to nurture our spirits, when we take time to seek out the people making positive change in our communities, when we find the truth about what is going on around us.
In moments when we feel the waves of fear and uncertainty crashing around us, it is time to take a deep breath, trust our innermost being, find a higher vantage point to see the truth of what is happening, and move forward with our our keel intact.
Please join me in a spirit of prayer.
Spirit of life, mysterious love, that to which all of us belong. In the tumultuous waves of this life, thank you for the care of community, for the energy of curiosity, for the joy of resilience. We each carry within us a seed, a root, a keel of this abounding mystery, that which carries us through uncertainty, disappointment, and heartbreak. May we each know and find this inner seed daily, to summon the compassion for our siblings who suffer, the courage to act on that compassion, and the perspective to know that when all seems lost, there is a deeper truth of wellbeing and connection. No matter the circumstance, may we reach to one another and within ourselves to find hope when hope is hard to find. May we each, and may we together, be whole. Amen.
References:
[1] How to Live Without Fear and Worry, K. Sri Dhammananda. (Kuala Lumpur: BMS Publications, 1989) p. 36 [2] Factfulness, Hans Rosling. (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018) [3] “Being Human”, Naima Penniman (of Climbing PoeTree). Video clip starting at 7:09 from larger video accessed via YouTube, “Climbing PoeTree Performance — Bioneers 2016”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eVFgz7GO3UTopics: Resilience