Friday Ramble - Resilient/Resilience

Local conifers are never brighter or spicier than they seem to be in late February and early March, and their resilience and cheerful demeanor are teachings to be assimilated and remembered. Here and there in the snow, evergreens lift their lavishly crowned heads toward the sun, and their blue-green tint and spicy fragrance are sure fire harbingers, signs that longer days and brighter times are just around the corner.

The first deep snow arrived a few days after Yule, then came village plows carelessly tossing clouds of white stuff over hedgerows, spinneys and solitary trees with careless insouciance.  We have been on the receiving end of heaps and heaps of snow this winter, and we can reasonably expect a fair bit more to fall before the end of March.

For all the winter weather still to come, evergreens in the woods are nodding their heads and sending out a heady perfume that hints at a tantalizing and (hopefully) imminent change in the seasons. The conks (bracket fungi) on trees along the trail wear caps of snow, and their branches are strung with melting icicles enclosing tiny red buds and snippets of blue sky.  No question about it, the trees on the Two Hundred Acre Wood are readying themselves for springtime, and they simply cannot be dissuaded from expressing their enthusiasm.

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 self or shape after being subjected to abuse, adversity, unnatural compression or a long cold winter.

That sounds like Buddha nature to me.