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.