A resilient ecosystem, I learned in a podcast this week, will remain productive despite a disturbance, such as a big storm or a heat wave. It will either decline and then bounce back or simply not change during the disturbance. (Full disclosure: the podcast is an interview with a professor in the college for which I do marketing, and she has no idea I’m taking an idea from her work off in this unscientific direction.)

I wonder about the resilience of our internal and collective spiritual and social ecosystems.

In the interview, the scientists talk about ecosystems “maintaining their function.” Our function is to be a conduit of divine love, to take part in the evolution of matter and spirit—perhaps to be the evolution—to become conscious of our interdependence and unity. How do we maintain our ability to do that?

A teacher I know said that a resilient human system requires that people have free time and free attention. Free time is pretty great because we can do things like

• Skip
• Sing or play music
• Play
• Be silly
• Create
• Wonder at the beauty of the world around us or a piece of art

And these actions free our attention, help us step off the hamster wheel spinning in our brains and be present.

When we begin to slow down and look around, we see the goodness in and around us. In The Homing Spirit, John Dunne says that “Violence comes of spirit against spirit…, when the human spirit is moved against its own inclination.” By this definition, I do violence to myself quite a lot of the time. Our spirits incline toward God, toward love, toward “the eternal in us,” as Dunne says.

Most of us were taught something very different about the natural direction of our souls (as brilliantly demonstrated in this hilarious video about the first day of Catholic school). We need to learn our own divinity so we can stop producing storms in our internal ecosystems. Then we can play our role in cosmic evolution, in that larger ecosystem we all belong to.

Douse yourself with beauty. Do what brings you joy. Not to deny disturbances or hide from them—and there are plenty right now—but to remain resilient, to maintain our natural inclination toward love.