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.