My daughter called me her rock the other day, but really, I am only a rock because she is a river.

All those little eddies and undercurrents and flippity floppity fish tails. That churning water, the breathless rapids, the unexpected falling, the jolts, the rolling and clamor of pebble upon pebble, the constant swish and all the days we spent moving through and across and with the earth together. This is what has taught me strength; this is what has shaped me.

It is neither the rock nor the river that’s made me strong – but the relationship between the two.

The kind of strength a rock has is admirable, of course. It is immoveable and always and constant; changing only the way it looks; painted in old age by golden moss, or feathered briefly by a landed bird. And yes, it can be reshaped, but only after generations. It can be moved, but only by external force. What defines the fieldstone is that it remains. You can count on it. It lives always on one side of the fence or the other; it often is the fence, the wall, the thing we stand behind or hunker down with or have to climb over to get beyond. Standing in this particular field, staring at this particular rock, strength looks like something solid and steadfast – a state that is constant and true.

But I’m pretty sure whatever strength I have has come not from constancy, but by constant change. It’s not by overcoming and getting past the thing — but by living with the thing. It’s living with the thing that over time brings us somewhere new, and makes us stronger. I suspect that resilience is kinder to our souls than steadfastness, and closer to a living love. Because resilience is always relational — it adapts and takes in new information and keeps looking closely — and through that relationship, it becomes stronger. The rock just sits there waiting for something to happen. For you to return. It’s kind of a one-way street. Kind of a monologue, an island, an isolated hunk committed to only one thing – staying put.

Resilience breathes, and opens and receives. It takes in, it feels. It’s not a you-can-do-this resistance challenge that braces itself for the next onslaught with straightened shoulders and clenching fists. Nor does it hoist itself across great distances to come out ‘better’ on the other side. It’s a continual, ongoing, ever moving current of togetherness; of the thing in the world that bends us, and our own gradual understanding that we haven’t been broken at all.

That’s the beautiful thing about resilience –as we get better at it we are actually creating new pathways in our brains. We start to understand that what used to be doesn’t always have to be. This seems a more valuable framing than viewing strength as a hard-won truth – as a static, heroic, immoveable, if steadfast, state. Who the hell can maintain THAT high bar? The fact is we will be bent, by grief or loss or trauma — so low we almost break. But we’ll never know how much we can withstand until the wind brings us to our knees. And after many many storms, once we finally realize we’re still standing, a new way of being can now enter our consciousness.

It’s in relationship where we become strong, and where resilience grows. What strengthens us is our capacity to spring back from great disappointment or from crushing loss, so that someday we can flow around obstacles, or allow the obstacles to flow around us. I know that after many years, I’m a better mom than I was when I began. At one point I may have wanted my daughter to see me as a rock, but now she knows the truth of it – that I bend, but don’t break. And she is better for that knowledge.

So I may be your rock, Olivia, but together, we’ve become stronger than that. We’ve become resilient. We are river and rock and an unexpected free fall — and the glittering, deepening stillness of love.