Throughstone #16: Resilience, Vulnerability, & False Choices

Snow devils traced their way across the blanketed pastures on Christmas Day, leaving me with competing notions of whether these daily forays into a temperamental New England landscape leave me feeling more resilient or more vulnerable. 

Resilience would have perhaps won the day, had it not been for morning news of a former flame’s dire diagnosis. Love had spilled with a shattering of glass and pools of shard-ridden burgundy, but that flame deserves to burn brightly, for much longer.

So I let vulnerability settle in, like the snow gathering on the windward side of downed branches. Fireside, it can be a compassionate companion, but out in the open, with wind-driven crystals, vulnerability is stripped of any sensibilities and simply operates as Occum’s Razor, reminding us to take heed and make every action count.

Showing strength in this perverse (but necessarily brief) era has become a cavalcade of malevolent memes that not only eschew but actually disdain and mock vulnerability. Petty purveyors of false idols have confused strength with resilience.

As I unroll yesterday’s harvest on top of today’s icy mantle, I’m reminded by some other entity that resilience and vulnerability are opposites only in their casting. Like magnetic poles or yin and yang, they couple. Defined in their individuality only by their mutualism, they rely upon one another for existence and purpose. Resilience is hard won, but so is vulnerability. Finding balance between the two is the craft of a lifetime.

Store the hay. Bear the winds. Remember to love.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Throughstone 250” is a purposefully constrained blog project. As a long-winded Southerner constrained by Vermont’s limited porch season and the Yankee penchant for paragraphs of three words or less, I’ve opted to aim for semi-daily reflections of precisely 250 words for the foreseeable future.

250 means something right now. Maybe more than we anticipated. It’s symbolic but incredibly important…and a 250 word count seems much less constrained than a 5-7-5 syllable count for a haiku. 

Like many others, I’m struggling to make meaning out of these tumultuous days. I’ve always found it useful to try and write my way out of tough spots. Looking for throughstones is just one more effort to try and generate some meaning from the mayhem.

More free-ranging rambles here, if you’re so inclined: https://www.freerangeprof.com/blog