The Regenerative Self and the Spirit of Spring

If you’re an early rising sister, you know the feeling of puttering in the predawn stillness, in the delicious solitude before the house or the world stirs. This morning the candles are already lit, the water is on for coffee, and rumbly-voiced chants hum on the Sonos. I woke with a hit to make a savory chickpea clafoutis for breakfast, so the scent of roasting carrots and sweet onions is in the air. I take my cup and step outside into the redwoods, and breathe it all in: the creek running, the birdsong rising, the exquisite emergence. This morning, like all mornings, is a resurrection. Whatever happened yesterday is over. The sun is coming up, and we begin again.
 
I've been thinking about resilience versus regeneration, and how the difference between them lies in their orientation toward challenge and change.
 
Resilience is about the ability to withstand stress, recover from shock, or return to a previous state after disruption. It’s like a tree bending in the wind and not breaking. A resilient system, body, or community can take a hit and bounce back—maybe a bit changed, but still intact. It’s fundamentally about endurance, adaptability, and maintaining integrity through difficulty.
 
Regeneration, on the other hand, goes beyond bouncing back—it’s about becoming more whole, more alive, more complex and interconnected because of the challenge. It’s a creative, life-forward process. Think of how a forest regrows after a fire, not returning exactly to what it was, but evolving with new species, nutrients, and structures. Regeneration restore vitality, increases capacity, and often heals or transforms what was damaged, depleted, or disconnected.
 
A few days back, I had a visit from the lovely Reverend Maya. We talked about the spirit of spring, of how many micro-deaths and losses we experience in a lifetime, and how, each time we’ve uncovered a deeper layer of capability, wisdom and knowing. We don’t freeze and lock the difficulty into our systems, instead we feel it all, and we grow. The mental health pros call this "post-traumatic growth", an orientation to life that feels potent. We become more loving, somehow, through all of it, not bitter, not resigned, not stuck.

 

Maybe you feel it in yourself and your friends, this coming into fullness of your own knowing? How all the things you've ever done, how every self-help book, therapy appointment, workshop, online course, coach, guide, journaling session, medicine journey, prayer circle, or grief ritual—every practice you’ve invoked in service of your healing and awareness—is bearing fruit. How you're not just bouncing back, but growing? How every loss has tempered you, and made you that much more attuned and appreciative of the celebrations, of the spring mornings. A kind of inner trusting arises, no longer so buffetted around by the winds of the world. 
 
Maya also invoked the presence of Ostara or Eostre, a goddess of spring, who is beyond the separating beliefs that we impose on the wholeness of life. Even if you're celebrating in the Abrahamic traditions (and by the way! Happy Eid, Passover, and Easter (today!). All of these holidays are lunisolar. Easter, for instance, is observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox. I remembered Donna and Carl Gray, the co-pastors at our old family church, who used to preach a spring sermon on this theme: we are an Easter people, they would say. Always beginning again. In the suffering and maltreatment of the world we have hope, we remember we are more than the body. Today, I would add—we are also an Ostara people. We are all inheritors of the archetype of spring, of regeneration, rebirth and renewal, ourselves this nature.
 
No matter what's unfolding, may the spirit of spring be with you, and the deep regenerative capacity that lives in your bones.