Resilient by Nature

"Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color."
- W.S. Merwin, "Separation"

The temperature on my rose - gold Apple watch bumped 30 degrees F at 10am yesterday morning and I flew out of the house in a bizarre sort of reverse yard-sale*, pulling on jacket, gloves, face mask, hat and sun glasses as I set my face toward the mountains and my back to cleaning and cooking. While counting myself among the luckiest people in the world, to be well and to have the Rockies as the backdrop to my outdoor walk, I still breathed a sigh of relief to be out of the house.

One of the double-edged swords that accompanies life in Denver is that the weather can be 71 degrees on Saturday afternoon and 21 degrees on Sunday morning. We had record lows on Monday and Tuesday mornings, too, and no one left the house for several days. That's true for a great many millions on earth at the moment, and it's hard. We miss our friends, our families, the ease of work and commerce. We pray for the ones who are sick and for the families who mourn. Our continued isolation and the burden of not having an endpoint start to weigh heavy.  The things we miss color our days, like Merwin's thread of absence penetrating his every act.

I keep telling myself to be resilient, like the birds who survived our cold spell by fluffing up into puffer-versions of themselves and camping out consistently in our bird feeders. I was eager to see how the crocuses and young tulips fared under the 3 inches of snow and freezing cold temperatures, and as I half-ran through the neighborhood, feeling my breathe crystallize on my face mask, I could see they were barely bothered. Short spring flowers shrugged their green shoulders and turned their tightly-budded faces to the sun. By the time I came back, an hour or so later, even the long-stemmed daffodils had straightened and risen above the shrinking snowbank.

"Nature is so resilient," I thought, and then caught myself. We are also Nature, not apart from but one with. If the spring greens and young things can survive a few snowfalls and record, bitter cold, so can we pass through this time of quarantine and societal change. We might get some frostbite, some stunted social growth, but we can also push through the trouble and turn our faces to the warmth. As Rihanna says "Turn your face towards the sun / Let the shadows fall behind you."  (Towards the Sun, "Home").

*A yard-sale, for those who don't ski or snowboard, occurs when you wipe out going downhill and lose all of your gear and outer clothing in the process of tumbling down a mountain.