Optimism

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.

“Optimism” appears in Jane Hirshfield’s altogether spirit-quenching Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (public library). Found in Brain Pickings