Friday Ramble - Resilience

Here and there among the deep drifts of snow and ice, a single spruce or balsam fir lifts its head toward the sun, and its fresh blue-green tint and spicy fragrance are reminders that longer days and brighter times are just around the corner. Local conifers are never brighter or spicier than they seem to be in March, and this year their resilience and cheerful demeanor are lessons to be learned and remembered.

First came the deep snows, then village snow ploughs carelessly dropping their loads of white stuff on hedgerows, groves and solitary trees with careless insouciance all winter long. We have been on the receiving end of a remarkable amount of snow this winter, and we may reasonably expect a fair amount of snow to arrive before the end of March, but my dear little trees are nodding and sending out a heady perfume which signals a tantalizing and imminent change in the seasons. They have begun their preparations for Oestara (or the Vernal Equinox) and springtime, and they simply cannot be dissuaded from expressing their pleasure.

The words resilient and resilience come from the Latin resiliēns, meaning to leap back, and we use them often without ever thinking about their essence, about what they really mean. When something is resilient, it exists in a state of innate balance and buoyancy, possessing the happy faculty of springing back or rebounding to its true form after being subjected to abuse, adversity or unnatural compression.

That sounds like Buddha nature to me.