“I am resilient.” by Anna Walker
Webster defines ‘resilient’ as the psychological capacity to adapt to stressful circumstances and to bounce back from adverse events; a process to build resources toward searching for a better future after potentially traumatic events.
How To Be Here: Finding Agency as You Weather Uncertainty
About nine years ago I did a hike with two of my closest friends up to Joe Lake. Cradled in the heart of the Cascades Mountains near Snoqualmie Pass lies Joe Lake. It’s a gem of an alpine lake, but you’ve got to work for it. This was my first hike after falling off a roof and crushing my ankle almost a year earlier. I was feeling apprehensive as I hadn’t pushed my body much since my injury.
Name it. Feel it. Move it. by Shonnie Scott
“When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion. . . . Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling.”1 And your body will continue to produce the feeling, even if you think you’ve successfully buried it. You only buried it alive and it will find a way out.
The Parable of the Trapeze
I often reference the metaphor of trapezing when navigating through a major life transition. I’ve made it a living metaphor, having personal experience with what it’s like to leap from a platform 30 feet up in the air and feel my body hurtling toward another set of hands that I’m told are going to catch me.
Barn Raising: Thoughts on Going Through Change with the Help of Others
In the summer of 1983, a tornado cut its way through rolling hills of Holmes County, Ohio. It only took twenty minutes to gouge 15 acres of land, destroying a forest of magnificent, 100-year-old hard woods. Trees weren’t the only casualty that day. Four Amish barns were also leveled. As though the tornado had been given a mandate to destroy them, these four magnificent pieces of Amish craftsmanship were turned into nothing more than kindling. For the Amish farmer, or any farmer for that matter, this would have been devastating. To lose a barn means also losing the livestock, hay, grain and equipment they housed.