Over recent years, I’ve become fascinated with the puzzle of human resiliency. Apart from a person’s genetics, what goes into building, physiologically and psychologically, a hardy temperament and a strong body?  Some religious traditions speak to this, so do martial arts disciplines. But it’s complicated. We do know some things: There are different kinds of strength: physical, emotional, spiritual. There’s a kind of resiliency that comes from being stubborn, narcissistic and plain angry. There’s also a resiliency that comes from sensitivity, flexibility, compassion, balance and inner conviction. From the outside, such “above-the-average playing field” kinds of strength seem similar. But the origins of these two kinds of resiliency suggest there’s different ball games going on at the heart of the matter.

The natural world offers us intriguing lessons about such things. This fall I stood atop of a 300-foot ridge at the Grand Sable Dunes, a part of the Lake Superior National Shoreline, near Munising, about an hour’s drive East. A Park Ranger knelt down and pointed out what appeared to be nothing more than some dune grass. He said wistfully, “This particular species, Marram or ammohila breziligulta, doesn’t look like much. But interestingly enough, it literally thrives on adversity. The harder the winds, the more severe the temperature, the more uneven the rainfall, the stronger it grows. It’s the first vegetation to bring back soil from rock and sand.”

I later discovered that Marram grass doesn’t seed like normal plants. It actually produces very few seeds, if any, atop the sand’s surface. It propagates underground, through a maze of roots or what botanists call rhizomes.

A bottom line of real resiliency... not the rigid, look-at-me or mega-muscle tough guy version, but the “I’m not going away; I’m going to treat my enemies with respect; I’m ready to stand firm on honesty, generosity, compassion, and I’m not afraid, when the time calls for it, to do truth-telling in this world regardless of consequences”... is simply this: it’s about roots, about a core of spiritual identity. In which the real work of saving this world is done underfoot, hidden, unheralded and quietly.

-Jon