Three years ago, we did some work in the garden behind our house to address some drainage issues. This included moving a large, healthy green spire euonymus to an open corner to provide a bit of screening.
The gardener told us that the eunomyus is a resilient plant and it would transplant well.
In the first year, it lost half of its leaves, and looked sickly all spring, summer and fall.
In the second year, it was shedding fewer leaves, but it still looked like it wasn’t going to make it.
And this spring, it’s turned the corner. It’s not as big as it used to be, but it’s clearly strong and healthy again, the leaves are a deep green and shiny, and the plant looks healthy. Here it is.
We often take “resilience” to mean that we will be unaffected by hard things, but that’s not how it works.
Resilience is the ability to withstand hard things, to suffer and experience damage, and to still manage to come out the other side intact.
We are all, the world over, in the midst of living through a very hard, tragic thing. We have all suffered and we will all continue to suffer.
That we suffer does not mean that we are not strong, that we are not resilient.
We are all these things and more, and we have what it takes to get through this.
