After a really wonderful summer break, I am back and ready to go. I had some great trips to the Outer Banks, to my high school reunion, and to Maine. I spent time with very dear friends and also with my sister, who came over from London in August and went on the Maine trip with me. The weather was generally kind, and my spirit has been rejuvenated by the relative peace and calm provided by nature, reminiscing, and just being in the moment.

 

I really do love words, and when I begin to write the ezine, I generally do a bit of word exploration first. I find the word "resilience" to be a wonderful one. I often see parents who are in states of fear and anguish about a recent tragedy and how that may affect their child. I try to point out that most children are much more resilient than we think they are. In fact, when a parent frets and dwells on a tragedy and puts up a giant protective shield around the child after a tragedy, the harm can actually be magnified and the effects can last much longer.

 

I think we have a built-in drive to return to "normal", to have routines, and to strive toward goals. Busyness and being needed by others remind us that life does go on and that we have a role to play. It has been observed that the work of young children is their play, and that after something traumatic happens, they need to act out something about it as part of their play. It then becomes part of a mind-body dialogue which appears to help a child to feel some sense of mastery over the situation and some ability to put the experience somewhere on the bookshelf of their experiences. If a child does not have a chance to do this, the experience is not processed and understood well enough to be incorporated into his/her "narrative". Our narrative is a story which illustrates the meaning that we take away from the many different events in our lives.

 

Often we need space in which to reflect on what something means. But we also need the support to talk about it. So sometimes we need to back off, and let time pass. Other times we need an open invitation to talk and share our feelings.

 

Just as nature retains some resilience, and can recover from disasters in various ways, so can our bodies, our spirits, our minds, our families. Nature has its own wisdom and creativity. We do not automatically know as humans what the best path is for recovering and "bouncing back". I think there are short, medium and long bounces as well, depending on our inner/outer resources and where we are in our narrative. Patience may be needed, depending on the trajectory. The bounce after all does need to be authentic to last.

 

I guess reality does bite, over and over. There is a very old joke about buying swamp land from a really good salesman. And I hate to think how many ways that applies to the horrors caused by the hurricanes and by our financial institutions. We need to rebuild but with facts instead of dreams. There has been collusion among the powerful and the monied interests. There has been a shared and very pleasant delusion on the part of most consumers that the math can be tailored for our comfort, and we can make it all work out. There has been a shared denial that we are in fact at the mercy of forces much bigger than ourselves, and staring down these forces like it's the OK Corral is a self-destructive act. We have not had access to enough information to protect ourselves adequately from the lies told in the name of making a quick profit. Our government has either winked, looked the other way, or been clueless--or some combination of these. Maybe it's only from this experience of "the common bad" that we might be able to locate "the common good" again and begin to fight for it daily.

 

 

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