A few weeks ago, I was convinced the hydrangeas in my pots were beyond saving.
After such a long spell of dry weather, I had failed to notice how desperately they needed water until their leaves had already turned brown and brittle. I began watering them every day, more out of hope than expectation, but I couldn’t quite believe anything would happen. Sometimes there comes a point where we quietly accept that something has been lost.
Then, this morning, I noticed the smallest flash of green.
At the base of one of the stems, tightly folded leaves were beginning to unfurl. Looking more closely, I found the same quiet miracle happening in almost every pot. What I had taken for an ending was, in fact, only the visible part of the story. Beneath the dry stems, life had continued its patient work, waiting for the conditions that would allow it to begin again.
It made me think about how readily we mistake what we can see for the whole truth. Nature so often reminds us that the most important processes are hidden, unfolding beneath the soil, beneath bark, beneath water, or simply beyond the limits of our attention. A woodland blackened by wildfire may appear lifeless from a distance, yet beneath the ash, roots remain alive, dormant seeds wait for light, and fungi continue weaving their hidden networks through the earth. Recovery is rarely immediate, and sometimes it never returns exactly as it was before, but life possesses an extraordinary tendency to keep searching for another way forward.
Perhaps this is where our own understanding of resilience begins. We speak of it as though it were a human achievement, yet long before we gave it a name, the living world had already been practising it. Every tree sending out fresh shoots after damage, every perennial pushing through frozen ground in spring, every seed carrying an entire future inside something almost impossibly small seems to embody the same quiet principle.
While writing my forthcoming book, Abyssus, I found myself returning to a simple sentence that seemed to gather all of these moments together: everything wants to live. At the time, I was thinking about a starling escaping the grip of a sparrowhawk, but watching these tiny hydrangea shoots emerge from what I had assumed was dead wood, the words returned with a different kind of certainty. They seem to belong not only to birds or flowers, but to something woven through the whole fabric of the living world.
Of course, life does not always prevail. We know that too well. Plants die. Forests disappear. Birds are taken by hawks. Yet what strikes me, again and again, is not simply that living things survive, but that they continue to try. Given even the smallest possibility, they reach again towards light.
Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts of attentive wondering. It teaches us to stay with things a little longer before deciding we know their story, because what appears lifeless may simply be gathering its strength for another beginning, and what looks like an ending may already contain the first, almost invisible signs of hope.