When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, it left hundreds of square miles of Washington forest, once green and lush, buried under heavy gray ash. The landscape was instantly barren. In 1982, Congress created the 110,000-acre Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. Scientists and visitors alike were able to observe both the devastating destruction and over time, the phenomenal recovery of plants and animals, without man's interference.
When a Benedictine Sister, Sr. Mary, visited the site, she described buried cars and trees still sticking up at angles like spilled toothpicks. It was like walking on the moon. At the time, authorities were saying it was possible nothing would ever grow there again. She climbed as high as she could and looked around at the vast nothingness. When she turned to leave, she looked down, and there, in the ash, was one single purple flower. She was overcome with it’s transcendent beauty punctuated with one thought: "Here is life. It cannot be stopped or destroyed, even with the power of a volcano.”
In some areas, the destruction meant no going back to anything resembling it's previous state as land masses were dramatically reformed. Other areas thrived, grew lush and increased with new plant forms, forests, insects and animals. Michael Casey's 2015 CBS interview with U.S. Forest Service ecologist Charlie Crisafulli, quoted the ecologist's conclusion that "... life is enormously competent and well practiced at re-insinuating itself into disturbed areas. Our expectation should be that life is incredibly tenacious."
Resilience as a property in the material world, enables it to resume its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed; elasticity. In economics, we can look at resilience as the act of rebounding. Human resilience is conceived as our ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune. Spiritual resilience can be seen as the way in which our spiritual life moves and directs us to give way to life and awaken to new understanding of ourselves within the Oneness, the Whole of it all. These are all images of resilience to fuel our own leap forward. You, too, are a part of nature's tenacity. (Susan Nettleton)