Maybe residents of every area of the world need to be hardy. When we lived in the Midwest and endured raging, frigid snowstorms that rattled the windows, froze the water pipes, piled snowdrifts across the front door and trapped us inside for days on end, we called ourselves hardy. But we’ve heard friends that hail from other regions and nations describe torrential rains or earthquakes or mudslides or tornadoes or droughts they’ve withstood, and then calmly assert that people who dare to live there, of course, need to be hardy.
Recently, we Floridians – and in fact, residents all up and down the eastern seaboard – have another reason to call ourselves hardy. We have just weathered Hurricane Matthew and its aftereffects of power outages, floods, torn landscapes, and even, tragically, lost lives. For many there will be a long and agonizing time ahead to reach a state of recovery. Our hardiness now, as perhaps at other times, has been sorely tested.
Yet, observing nature’s response to hurricanes can be instructive for us as we fashion our own adaptive response to storms, can’t it? The wonderfully insightful poet Mary Oliver has written a poem entitled “Hurricane,” in which she masterfully describes witnessing the devastation to trees, bent and shorn of their leaves by hurricane winds. They stood naked and vulnerable after the storm. Oliver allows that she has also experienced a more individual and personal hurricane in her life, with what felt like equal devastation. She concludes her poem with these words: “But listen now to what happened to the actual trees; toward the end of that summer they pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs. It was the wrong season, yes, but they couldn’t stop. They looked like telephone poles and didn’t care. And after the leaves came blossoms. For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.”
How do we storm-tossed souls keep doing it? How do we find the strength to face the devastations of life, time after time, and carry on with confidence, hope and grace?
The poet who wrote the biblical book of Ecclesiastes claimed that for everything there was a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. Generally it’s true, the seasons are as dependable and as inevitable as the passing of time itself. But sometimes, as Mary Oliver notes, when devastation floods in and sweeps everything away, the green buds spring up out of season. Nature seems prepared to receive the thrust of new life whenever and however it arrives.
Perhaps we are constructed to receive that infusion of new life, too, even when it seems out of season. If we’ve lost a loved one, a job, a relationship, our health, our expected future, we may feel shorn of faith and trust and everything that made life worthwhile. We may feel it cannot come to us again. But surely there is no wrong season for reclaiming hope. We can dare to dream because after all, God seems to have built hardiness into us, and fashions us to receive new life, in any season.
