Parable of a fern

I felt like this little fern was greeting me. It makes me smile.

When I look at these tender green fronds rising through the grate of the storm sewer, I see how tenacious and full of hope this young plant is. It grows without any worry about whether it "can" grow, or will somebody run over it, or what will it do in winter. 

It does what it knows how to do, what it must do, without thought for the future, like all beings that are wild. 

I think about how akin we are, all living beings. How we recognize our struggle in that of another species. 

The fern is doing no more and no less than what every being tries to do: live, grow and leave seeds behind — whether they be baby ferns or a highly inconspicuous blog.  

Ferns and writers: struggling to flourish under less than ideal conditions. 

Fern strategy says that, if we are open to it, we will find opportunities we did not expect, at times and in places we would never imagine we would, if we are not too proud or too inflexible to inhabit a small, humble niche. 

And our lives are not any less beautiful or worthy or useful because they are quiet, green, underfoot, largely unnoticed. 

Some of us may tell ourselves we can only thrive, or create, or surprise ourselves at all under narrow or idiosyncratic "ideal conditions." 

But what if we don't even know what our own ideal conditions are? What if they are myriad, far more broad and varied than we think? 

And what if even the whole idea of ideal conditions at all is a false construct, just another way to hold ourselves back and to avoid trying at all?

The parable of the fern encourages me a little bit. It has been a lonely and strange two years. I've been hanging on in my dim niche under the grate. Sometimes a little sunlight peeks in. Sometimes I poke my head out through the bars, and try to remember what it feels like, that green feeling; when life pours through my veins. 

When thought is overtaken by living. 

Calling up our power

Still, the witch stirs her cauldron.

I hear her call, Come to me, daughter. Remember your power; the power of women.

 

She knows this long, old story. Century upon century of women, demonized for exercising their power and autonomy — another chapter in the story of sinful Eve eating the forbidden fruit.

 

After many hard-fought and all-too-recent gains for women in this falling-apart democracy — the so-called bastion of liberty, the so-called leader of the free world — the radical patriarchy is eager to criminalize a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and her own reproductive decisions.

 

Lives lost and options limited because of a radical minority's misogynist, hypocritical, pseudo-religious bullshit.

 

Whatever spin they try to put on it, it is clearly motivated by the same hatred of women that has never stopped rearing its ugly head; one of many systemic efforts to restrict and control women around the world.

Women with fewer rights than men. Women not allowed to drive. Women who must hide their faces in public. Women who can’t choose whom they marry or when. Female genital mutilation. Women raped and honor-killed. Women with no health care, no education, no vote.

 

The old, ongoing story of women, for millennia chattel, controlled, stalked. Harrassed, assaulted, disbelieved. Abused. Terrorized. Murdered.

 

Burned as witches.

 

Chances are, you have experienced one or more of these things. Maybe there have been times (years) when you felt like prey the moment you stepped out of your front door (or even inside of your own home). When vigilance became automatic, when assessing the threat level was engrained behavior from such a young age that you don’t even think about it most of the time.

 

And times when, whatever you did or didn’t do, it wasn’t enough to protect you.

 

They have always wanted us to believe we are lesser-than. Powerless.

 

Now, and in times past, we utterly reject what they want us to believe.

We live our lives, and resist, and persist. We make our voices heard. We join together. We use our power.

We rise: in the divine feminine, in the power of women.

 

Because no law or person or can make us less than we are. No law or person can change our belief in our equality, and our rights as women and human beings.

 

We cannot be constrained by the limits of others, only ourselves.

A pagan woman, I draw power from that quiet voice of the witch inside me. From the sacred earth, of which we are part. From belief in my soul, in all its shadowed beauty. 

I envision Eve walking forth from the garden of Eden; woman, and sinless, and whole unto herself.