Optimism, by Jane Hirshfield

I hope you will enjoy this poem, shared with me by my friend Toni Goodman.

Optimism Jane Hirshfield More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.

from Given Sugar, Given Salt , Harper Collins, 2002.

Estate Trail, Filoli. California July 2020