fiddleheads

first is, of course, a human enfant; second, a baby from the animalia kingdom; but a very close third - i believe - is a fiddlehead. maybe it's just because i've been tending it for a year and have formed an attachment, but my fern at work has sprouted over seven tiny branches in the last two days and my heart is overjoyed! i watched them sleep this morning through teary eyes and couldn't get enough. they are so fresh, so little, so green and healthy and alive. they are like a life unfurling itself leaf by leaf. and they are a little bit furry which also gets me.

i can't help but love them. and i can't help but think what a fiddlehead i've been all my life: new and terribly fragile, timidly unrolling myself into another year, protected by the older leaves around me who have made it all the way into the sun. i wonder if God feels like i do this morning and if He watches us through teary eyes and revels in the tiny miracles slowly opening themselves up to Him.

sometimes the world is like this big old almost-dead fern that God hasn't given up on. so He repots it, and waters it, and mists it every few days and puts it in the window so that it can get enough light...and He does it all because He still loves to watch it grow and thrive and most of all because He's not done with it. He is not about to give up on the new lives He's dreamed up.

and so another year arrived yesturday and with it a whole bunch of fiddleheads. my goal this year is to continue to simplify my life (to which my boyfriend's father replied: "but you're not finished complicating it yet." an excellent point, i suppose). but what i mean to do is to ask God to keep stripping away my complexities and bringing me back to the real things, to love, to faith, to joy, to taking care. i want to make sure that as i unfurl i do so into the core of what He meant my life to be.

i wish you the merriest of new years

and oh i wish you could see my fiddleheads today.

on blaming

i've been considering the tendency some of us have to blame ourselves instead of anyone else. personally, i made a career out of it at an early age, but by Grace it seems i'm now considering retirement.

i think i thought it a sort of virtue; that to take on the blame of someone else's fault must be a great sort of thing.

but i've come to realize it is my wicked little way out of forgiveness. it is miles easier to blame and berate myself as i deal with the consequences of a misdemeanor than to look my transgressor in the face and love him/her while bearing those consequences.

to forgive is to let go of any blaming. it is dealing with that crashing wave, caughing and spluttering and struggling to regain my footing without flipping the driver of the boat both of my birds. it is accepting what springs out of life's imperfections as life itself instead of a boulder in its way.

and if there's a boulder in my path that's because i'm meant to climb it.
and all that angry energy i'm trying to use up via self-blaming, i think that's there to get me over the rock.

the smell of snow

i usually can smell snow about a month off. i'll start telling people mid-fall that snow is creeping up on us and to be ready for it.

today it snowed. it's snowed a few times over the last few weeks, but today was the first day in Toronto with plows and saltspreaders and teams of people shovelling until they're blue in the fingers.

tonight when i got home from class i had to give my gate's iced-over lock CPR again as i had just this morning. the process that usually takes the longest two minutes one can imagine, took about five minutes tonight: the unfreezing of the lock, the cracking of the ice that's coated the clasp, the manipulating of the metallic fitting that holds it all together.

about halfway through the process i caught the scent of the gorgeous snow that had caused me so much grief today; it smelled like my childhood. like a very specific moment in my childhood when i had run in to a lone kitten in the snow. it was dark outside and very cold but my mom was allergic to cats, so i couldn't take her in. instead i spent about an hour making her a little house into which she gladly nestled. i watched her for a while after that, basking in the glow of a fresh kitten snuggled in fresh snow. i watched and wished and don't remember feeling cold at all.

that memory brought me a little bit of warmth on a very cold tonight and i shook my head while chuckling at the fact that i get to do all this frozen gate stuff again in less than eight hours.

red wagon

at times when i drag my flower cart around at work i feel just like little me with my red wagon. i saved up for that wagon and i loved it all the way through. once i had it i filled it with dolls and rocks, sticks, toads and bits of earth; all the sorts of important, magical ingredients for a good day when you're five. these days i fill my cart with plants, flower arrangements and vases that tip over, break into a million pieces and make me wonder where God is and why He didn't think it a priority to keep my arrangement upright.

when i go all the way up to the penthouse floor and stand underneath the warm air gusting from the heating duct, i feel good all over. it seems that everything is okay and how could it be anything but when my skin is so newly warmed by silken air that smells like propane.

tonight i'm going to buy a big, fancy, terribly expensive hot chocolate from Second Cup on my way to class, and i'm going to buy it on my visa because i am out of all other kinds of money. but a day full of blustery snow and freezing hands is best ended with hot chocolate if it's at all possible.

who Mondays belong to

this morning i wrote to a friend that i love the course of a week. i am so grateful for the grace-filled mondays that lead us all the way to hopeful fridays. i do love it.

but sometimes when you're stuck smack dab in the middle of one of those mondays and your mood is just bad news and you'd rather be covered in the downy-brown warmth of your friendly comforter than working and trying to talk yourself down from an emotional cliff edge...in times like these mondays just feel like mondays.

but i remember what's worse than a hard day that you have to make good somehow: a good day that goes bad on you. like the friday when Christ should have had everything to look forward to but instead He was stripped of even another grace-filled monday.

He knows a hard day and He does not leave any of us alone to face one. Even the wimpy kind of hard days like the one I'm having; He is there. He is here.

He owns hard days.

He is worth...

It's a friday, my favourite day I'd have to say because I have everything to look forward to: at least one morning to sleep in, church, friends and maybe a date with the dreamiest man alive. I'm at work and shouldn't be writing this but my heart is aching and the only remedy for it that I approve of right now is to send up some praise that is always due and never spent too frivilously.

So today at work what I have to say is that Jesus Christ is worth it all. All of it. The good things in life, He's worth those. He can have them. And the hard things, the tough days, the heart aches and broken bones...He's worth those too. I'll live them just so You can have them, Lord. The things You give, Father, You are worth them too. So take them...not that I won't receive them, but let me receive them with open hands so that You can do whatever You want with them and me. You can take them back if You need to for Your glory, and it will hurt, but they are Yours and only mine in that I am Yours too and You have put Your two things together: me and Your good things. You are worth it. You are worth it all.

That will be my song today through the tears that are falling from the sky, in the darkness of the day, in the glory of Your goodness, in the pain of my humanity: You are worth it! So HAVE it, Lord! Have all of it! Have me! Have all of me!

barefoot on bloor...

sometimes life is like this: you're walking beside a busy street, feet sore for this and that reason, and your heart's reverb is in the same direction. things that matter are falling, shattering, or just plain walking away from you. you're missing them or at least thinking about them.

and then it starts to rain

i mean pour

so you walk for a bit more thinking it won't be so bad, you won't get so wet. but you get so wet. so up goes the umbrella-ella-ella eh eh eh, and down goes whatever was in your hands-ands-ands oh oh oh. slip slop slide, your feet wish-wash around in your flipflops. off go the flipflops.

the rain gets harder

you're drenched to the bone, umbrella down, flipflops off walking barefoot down bloor street and smiling wider than you've smiled in months because you realize that life is hard...and that's half the fun of it.

daisies

You can probably tell, can't you...that I'm going through a difficult time. I've not been writing, singing, creating. Seems like my insides have drained out my toes, like water escaping from a tub. I am being an empty tub.

I ambled along the Lakeshore alone tonight...well alone and together. You know :) So glad of that. The bushes and flowers were beyond beautiful. As they say to do, I did: I stopped to smell them. But they did not have a scent.

What happens when you stop to smell the roses but the roses don't smell?
What do you do then?

Flowers give off scents to attract certain pollenators to them (like bees). Once they've been pollenated they discontinue their scented ways, then the flowers fall. The plant has been set up for another season of growth and new blooms, the flowers have done their jobs and can now rest up for next year. All we're left with is a big, healthy, green, non-smelly plant.

I saw some of my favourites, daisies, but picking them isn't allowed. So I walked on and about an hour later I was back at the daisies. I was crying by then, attempting to let out all this mysterious stress...and there were the daisies all lovely and happy and cared for. How I ached to put one in my hair. And then I stopped.

a daisy for me on the ground

Picking it up my tears changed their tone a bit. Joy began to stream gently down my cheeks: He remembered me. I walked on taking in the various versions of love all around me. There were friends chatting, lovers cuddling or walking hand in hand, families slowly keeping up with their toddlers...and there was me, just me, happy to be by myself and yet somehow sad to be the only one walking without an other. And then I stopped.

three more daisies friends for my other daisy on the ground

In awe of God's timing I walked on and cried for the reality of it all. Life is hard but it is also continually full of God's care, provision and goodness.

"If flowers have the finest clothes,

and birds they sing 'cause they have food

then how do I think that I'll escape Your care?

You're there."