Resilience: Yours or Ours?

I’m sitting here at our kitchen table, looking out on another cool and sunny day, orioles and a red-headed woodpecker just outside the window. My task at the moment is to write the opening essay for our annual Chosei Zen fundraising campaign, asking for your support of our 2026 operating budget. This won’t be the last email you receive during the month-long effort – you will hear many voices all speaking to this year’s theme of resilience.

I’ve been mulling over this theme for the past month and had been planning on writing about the hard training any of us must do to cultivate our personal resilience in the face of hardship. Somber stuff. But, to be honest, I can’t write that essay today. It is too didactic, too self-centered. I’m looking out at our hillside to the west and realize there is no meaningful way to talk about the resilience or lack thereof in any individual tree over there. It doesn’t make sense.

When a hard storm blows in out of the north, trees shelter each other from the force of the wind. When we have a long stretch of weather without rain, no one tree gets to suck up all of the ground moisture. All of the rich mineral content, fungi, and organic matter in the soil doesn’t go to the biggest and strongest tree growing in the woods. There is a forest, not just a random collection of trees each competing for their own survival. There is a whole.

I don’t need to write the obvious sentence to follow that one, but I will. We humans are a forest; we are a whole. It is not a question of my resilience or your resilience in the face of hardship. It is our resilience. And, I’ll go one step further. In any given gathering, the weakest person, the least resilient, is the one who thinks they stand alone. Right now, reading this…are you a tree or a forest?

A voice from the woods – Gordon
Spring Green Dojo
May 2026