Yesterday I celebrated Midwinter in Stonehenge. It was dark, bitterly cold and utterly magical. I’m honoured to sit on the Council of Elders for a druid gorsedd that holds ceremony there at each solstice.

This year we looked at resilience- for us personally, for community and for the more than human. These were my words (or therabouts) and I felt drawn to share them here:

I wanted to share my personal story and what I have learnt about resilience along the way.

I’ve lived with cancer all my life. From a small child, I’ve had hundreds of treatments, removing cancers with knife, with ice, with fire. My body carved, disfigured, scarred a little more each time.

For a long while, I thought the only way to fight this was to deny it’s impact. I thought that being

brave, or at least pretending to be brave was what resilience was. I tried carry on as if it wasn’t happening, to stick my fingers in my ears and shout lalala….I’m fine, this is fine.

But it wasn’t fine, it isn’t fine.

I wasn’t fine, just as so much in our world isn’t fine. It’s hard, its brutal, it hurts, we see pain and destruction and hate all around us.

And that can make us all feel powerless, small, hopeless.

We can’t any more pretend things are fixable, that the climate and species and humans are going to be ok, by some miracle, some change of heart. We are not.

Over time, my way of dealing with what was happening to me began to crumble. As I lost more and more, I couldn’t pretend anymore.

I couldn’t be the brave, invincible creature I’d thought I needed to be. I caved in, I let the pain in, I voiced all the pain, the loss, the sheer injustice of it all. I wept over and over and over. I still do, often. I let myself feel, let in the hurt, crashed and burnt over and over.

But in the breaking, comes the mending. And in these cycles of breaking and mending, breaking and mending, that’s where we begin to learn resilience.

On the days we struggle to drag ourselves out of bed, on the days where the grief comes in waves we fear may drown us, on the days when the pain is too great to bear, on the days when we are frozen in fear. These are the times when we learn the true power of resilience, the days when the struggle is too much, and yet we endure, and in the enduring, we grow, we may even learn to thrive.

An oak tree in a sheltered park can grow strong and straight and true, but is that resilience?.

For me, a gnarled, split and scarred moorland hawthorn, bent and shaped by the wind, shows resilience so much more, in all its broken limbs and twisted trunk. Breaking and mending, breaking and mending.

So what do we need to build resilience?

We need truth.
We need honesty, we need openess, we need vulnerability. We need to be able to show up as we are, not as we feel we should be.
How can we do this? How can you do this?

We need community.
I am so blessed to have a community to lean in to, to be held, to be witnessed in all of my marvelous, messy, broken human-ness. We need space to support and to be supported.
We need to build, to maintain community around us that can hold pain and grief and loss and fear.
How can we do this? How can you do this?

We need courage.
Not the cartoon bravery, the fearlessness, the ooh I’m so big and strong kind of courage. Instead, a courage to break and to mend, to meet challenge after challenge after challenge, and still see the beauty in the world, alongside the horror.
How can we do this? How can you do this?

At this time, we need resilience more than ever, for ourselves, for our communities, for the more than human, for the planet.

To meet the challenges ahead maybe Maya Angelou says it simply, yet exquisitely perfectly.

“And still I rise.”