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“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
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There is an old Zen Buddhist story about a bamboo grove and a mighty storm. When the winds began to rage, the tallest and strongest trees stood firm, trying to resist the force of the storm. But their strength worked against them. The wind snapped their branches and toppled their trunks.
The bamboo, however, bent low. It swayed with the wind, bowing deeply but never breaking. And when the storm finally passed, the bamboo stood upright again—rooted and whole.
As we begin this new year, this story reminds us that strength is not always about standing tall. Sometimes, it’s about learning to bend. The year ahead may bring challenges we can’t yet see—uncertainties in our nation(s), concerns about our climate, and anxieties about justice and human dignity. Like the bamboo, we may face strong winds that threaten to uproot us.
But what if, instead of resisting, we learned to bend? What if we avoided knee-jerk reactivity, which makes us hard and unyielding, and instead trusted the deeper strength of flexibility, faith, and resilience? Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön once wrote, “You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.”Storms may come, but they don’t define us. What defines us is how we respond—how we root ourselves in love, bend with grace, and rise again with courage.
The new year invites us to practice love, to trust the rhythms of life, and to face the future not with fear, but with principled courage. It asks us to be both rooted and flexible—to remain grounded in what matters most while adapting to what comes our way.
This doesn’t mean ignoring injustice or avoiding hard truths. Like the bamboo, bending is not weakness—it’s wisdom. It’s knowing when to stand firm and when to yield, when to speak out and when to listen, when to act and when to rest.
As we step into this year, may we be like the bamboo—resilient, flexible, and deeply rooted. May we face the storms ahead, trusting that grace will hold us steady and that love, like the bamboo, will prevail once again.
We are in this together,
Cameron
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