Came across a word I hadn’t seen in a long time….fortitude. I was reading Emmet Fox: You must learn to bear failure and disappointment with fortitude, I read, and fortitude stopped me in my tracks. What a grand, old word. I never hear it any more. It seems like we’re told many things endlessly by the constant news/opinion feed that is our lives these days, but very little of it has meat on its bones. Who tells us life can’t be all roses, that it isn’t meant to be, that there are deep lessons for us to learn, and life will keep bringing back circumstances until the lessons are acknowledged, that sometimes disappointments seem overwhelming and all we can do is hunker down, survive, and display fortitude?Patience, endurance, sufferance, tolerance, forbearance, long-suggering, strength, courage, backbone, heart, grit, mettle, tenacity, perseverance, resoluteness….not popular words, but strong words, lots of something worthwhile and tough clinging to the letters. I’ve had to display fortitude in my life’s journey. What about you?
And the rest of Emmet Fox’s quotation: You must learn to bear failure and disappointment with fortitude and you must learn to stand success without allowing your heard to be turned. Our culture focuses on the success part, doesn’t it? Particularly advertizing. The right car, the right deodorant, the right beer will bring what you want. But where are the sages to tell us how to deal with the inevitable disappointments that are also there? Is it that life is too comfortable these days, so that we’re affronted when its other side appears? I don’t know. You tell me…..
Garden trivia: could not resist the raspberry shadings of a rose called 
Cinco de Mayo. Now I fret about where I shall I put her in my mostly shady yard. The garden is turning into a palette of shaded green, white, lavender with blue underneath….
Karleen Koen — writing life 