On Being Resilient

August 4, 2024

Sunrise, August 2, 2024

Sunrise in the marina. After several very hot days, 70 degrees (21C) and a gentle north breeze feels pleasantly cool. The mallard crew has swelled to nearly 50 birds. Youngsters and molting adults alike roam the cove and preen on the rocks. Barn swallows swoop for their feathers and orioles sing from the trees.

One of the mallard crew.

I watch a duck that looks out of place swim across the cove. My first thought is common merganser, but that shouldn’t be true in August. The bird is close in size to the mallards which rules out the smaller hooded merganser. Common mergansers are not seen here between mid-April and late October.

Hello beautiful lady, what are you doing here?

As the duck gets closer, I confirm it is a female common merganser. She swims into the cove and skirts the edges of the mallard pack, diving for fish as she goes. I walk around to get a closer look and she doesn’t fly away, which strikes me as odd for a merganser. The mallards don’t care much about humans, but mergansers usually do.

Finally, she comes right up on the rocks by the parking lot and now I can see why she doesn’t fly away. She has a wound that appears to be healing on the back of her neck. She is missing most of the primary feathers on her right wing and several tail feathers. Like the youngest of the mallards here, she probably can’t fly right now.

You can see she’s missing a lot of feathers.

Despite her injuries, she appears to be energetic and well-fed. She is surviving. Watching her preen, I find myself thinking about what it takes to be resilient. During this period when she is healing, she needs refuge from predators. What better place than the marina? The humans around (sometimes at all hours of the night) will reduce the number of natural predators. The mallard pack provides a place to hide, just as it does for the young ducklings. The fish in the marina are plentiful.

Coming home, my garden shows me another form of resiliency. I planted coneflower, poppy mallow, and stonecrop in late May. I was a little late in planting so I planted small plants rather than seeds. Getting this garden planted was its own little miracle, as I wrote about here.

The cone flower in the field - what I was hoping for in my garden!

Initially, my garden wasn’t looking very successful. The bunnies ate the poppy mallow and coneflower leaves. They mostly left the stonecrop alone, but it didn’t really seem to grow much. I figured the new plants would have to spend most of their energy creating roots, so I kept watering, hoping at least the stonecrop would survive.

I dream of multi-colored, native flowers growing happily in my tiny garden.

Several times the poppy mallow shot up new leaves - and several times the bunnies ate it back down to the ground. I assumed I might have to try planting seeds in the fall or find a different plant that was more bunny resistant. I kept watering. The stonecrop showed some signs of life but the coneflower didn’t change at all.

I’d love to find butterflies in my little garden, like this yellow swallowtail.

This week, eight of the nine poppy mallow plants again have new growth, but this time there are many more leaves and it seems to be coming up faster. There are new stonecrop shoots coming up and some of the plants are producing new flower buds. More surprisingly, the cone flower I had given up for dead is suddenly sending up new leaves! It’s still alive after all.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to the merganser or the plants in my garden. Watching them, I wonder what I might learn about resiliency.

The baby barn swallows, like the poppy mallow, say “don’t you dare count me out!”

I tend towards being mentally and emotionally rigid. I like my routine to be the same, for things to fall nicely into place. I don’t like to be surprised - except when I’m out with my camera and then I only want to be surprised with the good things.

I suspect I look like this when faced with a bump in the road. Ok, probably somewhat less relaxed.

Not surprisingly, I struggle with stiffness in my body. When things don’t go my way I often respond with tension and frustration. I spend a lot of energy trying to make sure something doesn’t happen again which reduces the energy available to learn, adapt, and grow.

Mama duck still has all 7 youngsters with her, teaching them how to adapt to the world they will soon face without her.

When I am knocked down like the merganser, how can I better respond with acceptance? How can I put my energy into healing and adapting? Can I move towards others who might help rather than hiding away and not showing myself?

Knowing when to look to others for help versus going solo. (orchard orioles)

When the world nibbles at my edges, can I put my energy into rooting and building the strength to come back stronger? Can I discern when it is time to rest, when it is time to grow deeper roots, and when it is time to try again?

These trees have stood in the water since the dam was built 40 years ago. They must have deep roots indeed.

When I was younger, I earned the nickname “Bobo” - as in Bobo the punching bag doll. The upperclassmen on the college volleyball team named me this because they said, “We knock you down and you get right back up.” This resiliency is in my DNA, I just need to remind myself of it.

When the young male hummingbird tried to knock this female off the feeder, she just sat there and stared him down until he backed off. She didn’t engage, she just persisted.

I am practicing with small things. Today when I got to the grocery store the produce section was very sparse. The truck had not arrived on time. I felt the frustration, uncertainty, and tension in my body. My mind started to spin about how I would feed myself properly this week and immediately created all kinds of problems that do not really exist.

Sometimes I need to let it go, like the ducks let go of their feathers.

I’ve been working with the question, “What is the gift in this?” Now I can add, “How can I better respond with resilience?” Working with small problems is the way to start building this skill. I recently found a company called Zox that makes inspirational bracelets from recycled water bottles. Today I put on these two:

Every stream encounters boulders it must go around. Every life encounters challenges we’d rather not face, both big and small. Listening to stories about Olympians, all of them overcame adversity somewhere along the way. The US presidential election just became one big lesson in resilience and adaptation. The big problems facing our world must also be addressed with resilience and adaptation.

The stardust on the water lives in me too.

How do you respond to the big and small challenges life puts in your path? How do you build resiliency?