Resilience and Shared Ground

Receive the unexpected gifts

Coming in from my yard, everything waterlogged from the recent storms, I notice mushrooms growing along the base of our kitchen door. They are pale peach colored half circles growing in unruly rows splitting the wood. Like little seashells splashed by rainwater into creation. Each seems to have a quiet secret, arriving here overnight, taking over this man-made border between inside and outside.

In Winter life must be tenacious. It must find cracks and crevasses, wind breaks and reflected heat of daytime sun. Life continues in the way of roots moving toward any opening. Many of our plant kin go dormant in the Winter to survive. They drop their green leaves and become skeleton-like versions of themselves, reserving energy and resources until they feel the call to grow again.

When plants are dormant, they may look like they are dead but they are actually thriving by pulling energy inward and waiting out the harsh weather. A dormant plants branches are still flexible, they will not snap or break like a dead plants will. If you were to scratch its stem you would see moist green inside. And under the soil its roots are alive and receiving nutrients, and as we now are learning, they are communicating with neighboring plants through the mycorrhizal network. These networks create adaptive communities of mutuality, all sharing in the survival of each other.

How do we humans understand resilience? I know I had been taught to think of it as a factor of independence. I am resilient on my own, survival a lonely battle. But this is so far off base. Yes, sometimes to survive we have to choose to drop the extra, stop growing for a time, breath in what feels like shallow breaths, inward, inward, one careful moment at a time. We may feel incapable of giving. But we find our resilience in resources around us. It is in our shared ground. Resilience is a matter of receiving.

Yes, resilience is a matter of receiving from what is there at the time we need it. I remember in my psychotherapy training we learned that a child in an abusive or neglectful home environment will be likely to thrive if they have just one adult who loves them and provides a safe space for them to feel understood, even for just an hour or two a week. This little bit of love may not seem like much. It is not the ideal amount we would wish for any child. But it can offer an opening for natural resilience.

It can be easy to lose our hold on the abundance steadily by our side when we feel a need to draw our vision inward, focusing on the next task at hand, shuffling forward hunched against the cold. These days, the spirit of the times mesmerizes us with tiny videos and doom stories and outrage. Plans and futures seem uncertain; we are not even sure what we should stock up on. We are all asking, “What will I need?”, worry echoing around us.

What will we need? We need each other.

All of our resilience is in shared ground. The ways we tell one another our stories and weep together over sorrows, the way we create meals for many and carry baskets of extra to the neighbors, the way we borrow a tool and talk someone through a recipe over the phone, the advice and the loans and the simple compliment and the sympathy card and the candle lit with a prayer and the homemade salt scrub and the recommendation of an honest mechanic and the willingness to help move the heavy couch to the curb to be picked up by someone new. Little moments of giving and receiving. These are the nutrients running through our shared ground, the cracks that give just enough room for some dream of growth to find its way.

And we must recognize resilience in one another, seeing in a greasy-haired sweatpants-clad inertia of silence a preservation of resources of one still very much alive. Sometimes we each need to pull back, way back into a dormancy of survival. And sometimes we are the ones watching, waiting for a friend to green back into the one we know. As we wait for signs of new life, we listen to the quiet communication underground and send our own messages of hope and love and days to come.

Winter and the Earth element teach us about receiving when gifts seem scarce. We are reminded to look underneath at the tenacious, madly improvisational life making its way unseen. Gifts of unexpected growth in places we least expected it – Mushrooms on doors! A bird nesting its eggs in the bright purple pot by the driveway! A nasturtium vining out of the gutters! A poem from your grief! Wonders.

Receive them all. And keep going.

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EMBODIMENT PRACTICE

Let’s do a practice that’s great for days when you feel tired. You can do this laying down on the floor or a firm bed or sitting upright in a chair with good back support. Either way find a position in which you feel supported and can relax. Close your eyes and take a shape of stillness for now, just letting your body take a break from moving and doing.

Now pick a part of your body you can feel some curiosity towards today. Let’s say you pick your right shoulder – Begin to explore the smallest movement you can make with your shoulder. The smallest, most subtle movement you can consciously make and still feel it. If someone were looking at you they most likely would not be able to see this movement at all. But you can feel it. Explore this subtle movement like a pulse bringing life to this part of your body. See if you can feel a relationship to this movement and your breath. Then settle into stillness again and see how you feel. You might find that this small movement relaxed the area or made it feel warmer.