Resilience Through Beauty
Life is glorious! Especially when the sun shines, somebody loves us and we know it, and we have enough.
Life is challenging! Especially when it seems half the country despises the other half, in both halves.
Life is scary when we hear that the lungs of the world are on fire, and the new climate cycle is Flood, Drought, Flood, Drought.
Ok, enough fear! How are we to be steady in these perilous times? Besides numbing with food or wine, Netflix binges or just denial, how can we be alive in our world, aka resilient?
We can start small, by finding a place of beauty in nature which calls to us, and being with that as fully present as we can, for at least 20 minutes. And the beauty might be small, such as the violets which grown in the lawn, or a stubborn bit of grass pushing up through cracked cement. It could be the sun on a river. What happens to you, as you stand under a shower of yellow leaves swirling around you on a fall day?
Life fosters life; those violets offer perfume to attract pollinators; those leaves will decay into soil for micro-organisms to nourish plants. When we let the energy of life into us, we are renewed. If you can’t get outside, use your memory, a houseplant, or the squirrel outside your window, to connect with the life force in nature.
Our beloved Earth has had cataclysmic changes over millennia, and life always adapts. We are part of nature, and have lived as humans a tiny bit of the time of life on Earth; rejoice in both. The natural world is much older and wiser than we are. We are a very young species. And we are part of the natural world, we also have its gifts of resilience and adaption. Just pay attention, and you will see.
