Varieties of Resilience — Rumi

Rumi captures this distinction I often point to, between domesticated resilience and wild resiliency, precisely.

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,the wild resileincy of a butterfly
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet,the wild resiliency of love
one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.

— Version by Coleman Barks
“The Essential Rumi”
HarperSanFrancisco, 1995

1 Comment

  1. A Resiliency Matrix, and Bush’s Shadow « wild resiliency blog!

    10/25/2007 at 6:49 pm

    […] which we are embedded. I want to deepen this thinking here to include a Resiliency Matrix as to the Varieties of Resilience. This thinking is developmental; feedback and tangential development are […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.