Tag: resilience

This Strange Sight

A few weeks ago, during a particularly cold snap in the weather, I was headed up the steps to my studio as usual. Nearing the top, I notice a strange site. Tucked into the narrow space where the wall meets the concrete was a single dandelion head in full bloom. It looked like a tiny drop of a summer had been deposited by my doorway right here in the biting chill of an early winter morning. It was out of season but right on time. Of course, I marvel at things like this. Things that defy the status quo and provide proof that life goes beyond the laws of our limiting expectations and logic.

I stood there for a minute or so studying it the way I study anything that sparks my curiosity. This small resilient blossom had endured weather that left a layer of ice on everything. By any practical measure, it should not have survived or even bloomed. Yet there it was, bright and unapologetic in full color. I’m going to take a little creative license and call it my burning bush. Just as Moses said in the story, “Let me turn aside to see this strange sight, why the bush is not burned” Why because it was out of the ordinary. It defied logic. Well, so did my fully alive dandelion in the dead chill of winter. And no, I’m not about to deliver to you ten stone tablets of commands. Nor did I hear a voice in stereo calling my name. But I did take the time to pause and pay attention. This was a lesson on resilience and inner power beyond circumstances. And this is what I’m sharing with you on this journey.

 “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” + Ralph Waldo Emerson

Resilience doesn’t always announce itself with fanfare. Sometimes it shows up quietly in the cracks we almost overlook. It lives in the parts of us that push toward the light even when logic and accumulated beliefs try to take us in a different direction. We get to the light through the darkness. That little burst of yellow engulfed in the bitter cold, reminded me that we’re built with a wonderful inner architecture; a divine blueprint bent toward life and creativity. We all, every single one of us, have a beautifully brilliant resilience that doesn’t depend on circumstance to shine. We have been gifted the capacity to withstand more than we imagine…and come out as gold. Trusting the process gives us the resolve to believe that challenges are for us rather than against us.

And then when we need it most, something arrives. The reminders I call them. The burning bushes. The dandelions in the dead of winter. The unexpected phone call or that lucid dream. Please don’t ignore them. They are the little signs with the big meanings. We can also call it grace, intuition, or a nudge from the unseen to remind us of what’s already inside us. Not merely to break the laws of nature, but to show us that we, too, are part of something larger, something capable of lifting us up to where we belong. May we slow it down here and there to listen, to see the dandelions blossoming in the winters of our lives. To bear witness to the burning bushes. And in doing so, may we come to recognize the language that speaks to us and directs us in our our mission on this planet.

Esperanza

  It was 2014,  on the eve of my hearing of the passing of the legendary luminary Maya Angelou that I penned these words held buoyant by hers, “Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”  For the last few weeks I’d walked in the challenge of addressing, through art, the theme of violence in Colombia.   Colombia was enslaved by a history of violence that continues to taint its present color in the eyes of the rest of the world.  In my time there, from speaking on the panel with the mayor of Medellin downtown at the Mayo por la Vida Celebration, to walking the neighborhood streets of rural Apartado with school age children; I saw the power of the very thing that Maya Angelou talked about-hope.  Hope, not the one that sits and reaches out to nothing and just waits. No. Hope, that unsinkable mindset that hovered above me night after night as I pondered the depth of the question asked of me many times during my sojourn there, “Do you really believe in world peace?” Each time, the question hit me like a dark wave threatening to drown the belief in change to which I clung ever so tightly.  

   One evening I had the honor of visiting a three year old girl who had been shot just days before.  As I knelt down beside her, without hesitation or concern she reached out and put her tiny arms around my neck and gave me a hug that could have embraced the world. In her sunshine smile and angelic eyes I saw what I needed to see, my answer, the reason I was doing what I was doing.  I saw hope in its purest form shining onto my faith and casting away any shadow of doubt that may have been lurking in my mind. Not the type of hope that sits waiting, internally pleading for something to change, but the kind that continually rises up in the face of all that would suppress us.  The Spanish word for hope is esperanza. That little crippled girl awakened in me a renewed sense of hope.  Esperanza was echoed in the face of every child and Colombian I saw from that point onward. I always reminded myself that there’s always a way.

  I am an artist, and art is my weapon of choice for peace and justice. What I mean by justice is that which I want for myself, I also want for others. I bring, like Maya Angelou said, the gifts the ancestors gave and I use them for the enriching of this planet we are blessed to inhabit.  Although I was a speaker of English in a Spanish speaking country, art is a universal language, and her most vivid color is love. I was met with the spirit I came with. I walk with art as agency for change. Change is coming. Not only do I believe it, I know it because I saw the preview of a new world reflected in the eyes of the children who looked into mine. And in their smiles and attitudes I saw the blueprints. That isn’t political or scientific, or any other form of measurable statistic.  It’s the power of esperanza. Where there is life, esperanza (hope) lives, and where she lives, change is inevitable. Hold on.