Posts Tagged ‘Poetry of Resiliency’

Open Forum: Your Wild Resiliency

September 24, 2007

My friend Marc Choyt, The Circle Manifesto blog, recently posted a question to my firstDead Horse Juniper, UT Varieties of Resilience post, The Resiliency of a Victim, asking what the keystone of my own wild resiliency is. You can read my response here, in the comments section following Marc’s.

Marc’s question to me however leads me to reciprocate (“Resiprosity is the Co-Creative Principle of Life!” is the 11th of the Wild Resiliency Assertions, after all.) I invite Marc and any who may stumble upon this post, with a sense of resonance, to speak to what ‘wild resiliency’ evokes within you, and where or how that anchors itself in your life: How is it ‘Keystone’ in your living?

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal
of your body
love what it loves.”

—Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Varieties of Resilience — Rumi

September 24, 2007

Rumi captures this distinction I often point to, between domesticated resilience and wild resiliency, precisely.

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,the wild resileincy of a butterfly
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet,the wild resiliency of love
one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.

– Version by Coleman Barks
“The Essential Rumi”
HarperSanFrancisco, 1995