Tales of Resilience:

 

 

Psychological resilience is that rare quality that enables some survivors to prosper after devastating trauma or misfortune, millstones that would sink most people.

Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Convention, is a living example of such resilience, the details of which he shared during their recent convention: “A Black man, from South Carolina, raised by a single mother — that was me.”  But despite a dreadful childhood: “When our power was cut off, when there was nothing in the fridge, when we lost our home to a con man, I never lost hope.”^⁠1

Despite the obstacles, he always had the ability to reach out fearlessly, defying all the odds. For instance, as a teenager, he reached out to Congressman James Clyburn, somehow persuading him to attend Jaime’s induction into the National Honor Society, thereby forging what would become a lifelong friendship. When he got accepted at Yale but had no money to attend, he had the gumption to reach out so convincingly to a member of his church the individual not only gave him the money he needed but also a summer internship.

Harrison’s story vividly reminded me of Gail Sheehy, a writer of my generation and the author of the best-selling book Passages, which traced how we all go through “somewhat predictable, somewhat manageable phases and points of crisis”  in our lives. One typical stage is emotional turmoil at midlife.

When on an assignment to write about Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s genocidal reign, Sheehy was facing her own midlife crisis: the last thing she expected to find was a daughter. But that’s what happened when she forged an instant attachment with an eleven-year-old refugee named Mohm, who had suffered immensely during the genocide: she had survived by eating roots in the jungle after witnessing the slaughter of her grandparents, her parents, and every one of her siblings. 

But like Harrison, Mohm was bold and spunky, a testament to the power of the human spirit to prevail against unimaginable odds. When Sheehy visited a refugee camp, most of the children retreated to the shadows, wearing blank expressions. But she spotted one little girl who had “hungry eyes, darting behind bamboo fences… following me like a deer through the forest.”^⁠2 

Soon after, when that little girl was introduced to Sheehy, they bonded instantly. At the end of their brief encounter, the girl asked Sheehy to take her with her to a free country. In essence, Mohm adopted Sheehy, not the other way around.

Of course, Sheehy’s best seller was not just about adopting a daughter. It was about the stages everyone goes through in the course of their lives, which can’t be done in a vacuum. Inevitably, she was talking about her generation, which also happens to be mine. Sheehy was able to resolve her own midlife turmoil by taking dramatic action. In her case, she learned to attend to the needs of others by adopting Mohm.

 I would like to close by switching the topic from individual psychology to society as a whole. When we widen the lens in this way, we see our country, like a person, has also moved through stages since its birth. Looking at it this way, we can explain the extreme polarization we face today as a result of collective anomie at midlife. No longer are we a brash young country pumped up with testosterone like an out-of-control gang of adolescent boys primed to dominate and plunder. Like Gail Sheehy, we are now searching for a sense of community and ways to better take care of each other.

Sheehy wrote that “the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never imagined at a younger age,’’^⁠3 During my own midlife turmoil, I was able to cartwheel back to graduate school and become a psychotherapist specializing in helping folks with PTSD.

And, just in time for our presidential election this year, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have cartwheeled onto the scene to lead us toward a more gentle, kind, and hopeful future.

xxx

¹ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/22/jaime-harrison-inspirational-grandparents/

² https://www.vogue.com/article/gail-sheehy-book-daring-my-passages-a-memoir

³ https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/25/books/mohm-pat-in-america.html

Photo credit: Apple tree in  my neighbor's abandoned orchard

Meditating on a Bitter Dock

 

Standing as a sentinel at the foot of my drive, I took this photograph of a bitter dock, a common weed in NH. The Bitter Dock is foreign to our state and, like many other immigrants, is considered to be an invasive pest; however, in the more-than-human world, it is held in high esteem by both birds and animals, who hanker after its seeds.

At first glance, my photograph only captures a moment, as Claude Monet set out to do with his paintings. But his work has become more than that: Revealing a depth revered by people all over the world.^⁠1

In terms of my own life, my bitter dock picture is equally profound.

When I took this shot, I meant only to document the bitter dock’s colorful autumn garb. But the longer I looked at it, the more memories it brought back, starting when I was a little boy of six. That’s when the loggers came to clear-cut the majestic stand of white pines adjacent to my home, changing the whole ecology of my personal landscape.

Cutting these massive trees opened up a clear view of the sky, inviting in a smorgasbord of sunshine-seeking species, including bitter docks and high-bush blueberries. After a few years, my mother and I were able to go there berry-picking, gaining access to the land through the same gap in the stonewall where the bitter dock now guards my driveway.

It was a different time.

When those white pines were harvested around 1950, timber had monetary value, while land in rural NH had virtually none. A few years later, this allowed my father to buy the land under the trees for the princely sum of one hundred dollars—land that soon would become mine.

Over the years, mixed hardwoods grew back where the pines once stood, gradually shading out the blueberry bushes and restricting the bitter dock to a roadside plant. For the last fifty years, I have shared this land with the maples, oaks, and birches, cutting their wood to feed my woodstove. I am aware that, as a human being, I am so much more of an ecological threat than my little bitter dock plant could ever be.

While many consider this little plant to be a pesky weed, for me, it represents a higher truth. It reminds me of Buddha’s Flower Sermon, a wordless talk he gave to his disciples by holding up a white flower.^⁠2 Only one person understood his message, signaling his approval by smiling.

Within Buddhism, the Flower Sermon signifies the direct transmission of wisdom without words; it is based on first-hand experience rather than rational creeds, intellectualism, or analysis.^⁠3 

The photo I took of this bitter dock is my wordless transmission of t his truth: It represents the primordial cycles of nature, grounded in my real-life experience during the short span of my 78 years on Earth.

I honor this wordless transmission by smiling.

xxx

¹ https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/interactive/2024/claude-monet-impression-sunrise/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f010

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Sermon

³ http://www.davidlai.me/2017/02/09/flower-sermon/