Awareness: Natural Resilience
[Exploring Life] The embrace of life is not without struggle. Obstacles and challenges are inevitable companions as we make our way through time. Our approach to the emergence of turbulence in life partially determines the character of our personal narrative. There is no life that avoids adversity. The story of our life is influenced and stylized by the nature of our response to the adversity that visits us. Adversity is not something that is desirable, but it is also a phenomenon that none of us can completely avoid. When adversity pays us a visit, it inhabits our body, mind and spirit. A resilient person describes someone of a firm persuasion in life, an individual that ultimately confirms adversity as a means to engage with the mysteries of life. Resilience means that we move through the heart of our misfortunes in life in order to discover what awaits us on the other side.
In nature we discover the most inspiring examples of resilience. Grass is amazingly resilient and can often be found growing in what appears to be an inhospitable place. Our side-walks are often wonderfully punctuated by small inlets of grass that grasp onto life in the slightest crack or crevice within the concrete. All too often, we view this as an unwelcome invasion and proceed to physically or chemically destroy the life of the grass in order to “improve” the appearance of the walkway. In our destructive pursuit of artificially manicured landscapes, we often miss a vital and essential message from nature and ignore the wisdom it communicates to us. Perhaps at times in our lives we too feel as though we are grasping on to a life within the cracks and crevices of an inhospitable world. In conversation with nature we can learn to creatively embrace the power of resilience so that we may approach adversity with wisdom and grace.
Nature is innately resilient and offers us inspiration to be resilient in our own lives. From the depths of a silo a tree has somehow persevered over many years and is now beginning to emerge from its confinement. This is a wonderful expression of resilience and a source of creative inspiration. We are left to wonder just how long this tree has endured its confinement within the cold dreary enclosure of the silo. Yet we also sense that somehow the confinement has offered some protection from the elements at large. That is to say, our confinement can offer protection for a time. We sense an immense and profound presence of beauty emerging from the depths of decay, loneliness, and abandonment. The soul revels in this landscape and our spirits converse with the infinite expressions of the natural elements that surround our experience.
I came across this picture in a wonderfully written article called Amid Rural Decay, Trees Take Root in Silos by A.G. Sulzberger. In a rural landscape that has been abandoned by people, the structures that once supported human life have been left to decay. The silo is symbolic of disintegrated memories and fragmented reminders of a lost human presence. People are now an absence in this environment, even though the remnants of their lifestyle remain. On the surface the surround appears bleak and uninviting, yet in the midst of this bleakness the silo has offered a sanctuary for the tree by shielding it from the harsh elements of the plains. Where human life has retreated, nature remains inspired and animated. These resilient trees are known as “silo-trees.”
Sometimes, like the isolated silo-tree, we might feel confined and abandoned in life. Our psychological landscape feels harsh and doubtful, and we begin to feel the presence of mercurial questions that initiate an irrevocable claim on our identity. At times our circumstances in life may perhaps lead us to believe that we are trapped at the base of a silo. When we try to ascend the walls of the silo, we realize they have been greased with our own psychological conundrums and spiritual trials. We cannot apprehend what is around us since the walls block our perception and awareness. We live a myopic existence in which even our imagination struggles to see life beyond our immediate circumstance. However, when we look up we witness the magnificence of the sky and we know there is another kind of space to inhabit if we can only find a way to move through our confinement – space that is inspired, a space that brings us back home.
Trees remain in conversation with us even though we may no longer listen to their wisdom. There is a sense of spirit in a tree that offers sanctuary. The patience of a silo-tree is quite remarkable. The lower aspect of the silo-tree reveals an absence of branches, while they flourish and expand dramatically near the top. The tree must have endured a harsh existence within the confines of the silo before attaining the freedom of the sky. It has grown in an enclosure that prevents it from experiencing the natural world around it, with the exception of the narrow glimpse of life above. To reach freedom it must grow through the confinement it was born within. Like us, a tree is not given a choice in matters of its birth. Like us, it must endure the circumstances that challenge our journey home.
A resilient person embraces motion; they do not visit their own distress for too long. To be resilient requires the mobility of body, mind and spirit. Yet motion does not necessarily mean speed or velocity. Often the most powerful growth occurs slowly and seemingly imperceptibly, but it steadiness amidst adversity that we secretly desire. In this way a resilient person still feels the brutal onslaught of anxiety that invokes a carnal fear, yet still manages, however subtly, some creative movement within. Being resilient does not mean we are fearless, but it does mean we allow ourselves into the embrace of our fears in order to creatively imagine our way through them. Resilience invokes creativity of the highest order.
Ken Wolf has taken several pictures of silo trees, and views them symbolically as “a kind of passing.” In life we are always doing our best to pass through the experiences that emerge along our path. Sometimes life can be remarkably harsh and we find ourselves mired in unexpected difficulty. Indeed, the adversity that visits us can at times be so harsh that we become bogged down by the weight of its distress, and everywhere we turn we only see the walls of the silo surrounding us. The walls that block our passage appear because we are not looking in the right direction. Even in the midst of darkness and loneliness, the silo-tree aspires to look up toward the light that appears in the distant opening above and through the passage it offers. The movement toward that opening remains patient and determined. Even though we cannot see the tree growing in any one moment, we know that growth is subtly taking place. There is movement, however subtle.
Each of us experiences adversity in our lives in a unique and individual way. A great deal of the adversity that visits us comes from a mysterious source. The character of the adversity we experience and our response to it is an important contribution to our life narrative. At times we can flow through an adverse situation with relative ease. At other times, adversity may visit us for an extended period of time and test our internal fortitude and resilience to the extreme. Perhaps the most extreme form of adversity is the dark night of the soul in which we question our very existence in this life. None of us desire the experience of misfortune and hardship, even though we secretly acknowledge that they are both unavoidable companions in life. It is only natural that we wish to live a comfortable life that is void of difficulty and suffering. However, in the extreme this kind of expectation causes tremendous anxiety and breeds an immobility of mind and spirit.
The silo-tree is a wonderful symbol of resilience in the face of isolation. It did not choose its place of birth, nor can it control the external circumstances of its surround. In spite of its confinement, it pursues growth toward a distant opening. The patience of the silo-tree is immense since it will be several years before it can emerge into the freedom of the sky. But it will make progress, however small, every day. And with passing of each day, it will be closer and closer to home.