Durham Shambhala Center

Dharma Corner

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the
sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly
blocked on one side, it turns in another.
A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable
earth.

Jane Hirshfield

 

 

©2007 Elizabeth Brownrigg