Resilience

There are new blossoms on the tubed pepper plants growing on the deck.  And more tomatoes are appearing on the grape tomato vines.  And today I picked a handful more of peppers from the garden.  All this, after the supposed "killing frost" last Saturday.  Perhaps this is the definition of resilience.

I think back to the stories emerging from the coastal regions along the Gulf of Mexico about how the area is recovering more rapidly than imagined, let alone anticipated after the BP oil rig offshore expelled copious amounts of oil into the waters a few years ago.  The awe-struck word they used to characterize it was "resilience."  Nature tenaciously clawing its way back to health.

Or in my case, back to growthful vigor.  My guess is that there is a lesson to be learned in all of this, not just for coastlines, waterways, peppers and tomatoes, but the whole of nature as well...

...of which people are a part.  Sadly, our species has worked hard through the generations of "civilization" to distance ourselves from the rest of creation, preferring instead to focus on that whole "dominion" assignment given by the Creator in the beginning.  We have relished and excelled in the multiform arts of "subduing" that supposedly went along with that divine assignment, loathing the thought that as creatures ourselves we might be subject to the same natural laws that applied to everything else around us.

But in all these personal and collective seasons of challenge when we are prone to despair, perhaps we could remember our "roots" and trust in the same capacities for resilience inherent in us as those plentiful examples in nature around us.

Anticipating the freeze last Saturday, Lori and I grabbed up what we could from the garden and the deck, including subjecting the tassly chives growing in one of the deck tubes to a severe haircut.  Now, scarcely a week later, the scalping and the frost notwithstanding, if it were a head of hair it would already find itself in need of a comb.

Resilience.