Resilience

Amazing that this plant found enough soil to grow in concrete!

When I left my long-time massage therapist in Boulder, she gave me a wonderful gift of some lavender oil (which she used during my massage), a CD with my favorite tape of all the ones she played over seven years of visits every other week. Best of all, she gave me a little packet of angel cards, which are small little cards with one word written on them. I keep them in a special bowl and every once in a while I draw one out and ponder the message. Yesterday, I received "Resilience."

It has caused me to wonder about what resilience means. In the top picture, I was amazed on one of our hikes to see this concrete bridge with a sprouted plant. I suppose years have passed to blow enough soil into the cracks to give this plant a place to purchase. And it seems to have done a pretty good job of it, too. My longtime boss, Mickey, used to take pictures of nature reasserting itself like this all over the world in his travels. I would see him huddled over a small crack in the concrete and knew that was what he was doing.

We humans are pretty resilient, too. As I watch my leg heal and read about the various illnesses of my blogging friends, as we limp and sniffle and ache -- and recover, I might add, I think about how we keep coming back up after we are down with life's little (and not so little) challenges. Most of the time we do make it at least part way back so we can continue to enjoy life.

Resilience is something my wild birds are needing in the coming months. I wonder if they know about winter or what their experience of life is. I seem to have an abundance of chickadees and goldfinches right now, along with the ubiquitous sparrows and now some nuthatches and woodpeckers are visiting the suet feeder I recently put out. The juncos are beginning to return, and I'm happy to see that they also like to eat the nyjer thistle that drops from the thistle sock onto the ground. I took this picture of one of my favorite chickadees, a chestnut-backed chickadee, yesterday, using the flash. At one point I had six of them all begging me to take their picture (I swear!). (Click any to enlarge.)

Then there is the resilience of our planet, in the face of the onslaught of population pressures that are beyond what I could ever have imagined when I was born 67 years ago. Walking around the Farmers' Market yesterday in the rain, I saw this sign perched against these warty pumpkins, and I realized that if we all treated the earth's resources as finite instead of infinite, we would all be so much better off. Because of the reminder by so many of my blogging friends, I am trying to lessen my footprint on the earth in every way I can. Maybe you can think of something you can do yourself. If everyone did small little things, maybe it will catch on. Probably not in my lifetime, but maybe in the lifetime of your children. Or their children. Thank God for Resilience!