Resilience and the Roots of Identity

Bill Hickey provided, as he often does, the bud from which this blog emerges.  His comment in yesterday’s Resilience and Costly Grace gives us a look at the powerful first word in that title, a word holy to him and Billie, and a word that calls us, like God, from within ourselves and from all around. 

Our deepest aspiration is to become who we most truly are.  An internet search for the words resilience and identity, a number of recent publications will emerge, supporting the idea that there is within us a drive to express who we truly are.  The authors help us see that groups that have been pressured to hide their way of living have an urge to return to it, to re-member, to be themselves to each other. 

When in Planting Hope  I shared our visit to Brightmoor, Bill and Billie’s new neighborhood in Detroit, I had not shared one of the richest and most haunting parts of the experience for me.  Spirals. 

Johannes Matthiesen was there in an empty lot one house away from Bill and Billie’s.  He and his colleague Thomas had come to Detroit from Heidelberg, Germany to work “with young people all over the world “as freelance landscape architect; I attempt to regenerate destroyed landscapes, at the same time observing the cultural approach common to a particular region (for example, the Native American Lakota people in South Dakota or the Aborigines in the Australian Outback). You can see much more about this remarkable man and his work on his website, www.sacred-landscapes.com/en .   But what knocked me out was the images he had drawn again and again on the blackboard leaning against the ancient cottonwood tree around which he and the neighbors were building a bench. 

The spiral is a shape found, as Johannes's chalk drawings show, throughout nature.  The Chambered Nautilus has been dear to me for decades, the appropriate symbol of the School of Architecture at my university, the subject of a poem  that calls us to aspire, to grow.  And Johannes showed that shape in a sunflower, in the nautilus, and, most gripping to me, in the way we draw the heart.   

Frankly, when I saw what Bill and Billie had chosen to do, I didn’t know how they could have done it.  The area is so beaten down.  But Johannes says it clearly, succinctly, elegantly.  “I attempt to regenerate destroyed landscapes….”  He does it by working with people.  He knows what social anthropologists are learning: groups that have been pressured to hide their way of living have an urge to return to it, to re-member, to be themselves to each other. 

Please read Bill’s comment in yesterday’s blog  .  As we continue to look at compassion and its apparent limits, Bill’s word and Johannes’s spiral take us to the heart of the matter, radical courage.

Tomorrow – roots.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.