The Fern Spoke to me this morning…

I have always been drawn to the fern.

Something ancient lives in it. A memory the land keeps of itself before we arrived with our categories and our clocks.

I love how it covers a forest floor…not competing, not climbing, just covering. A kind of quiet/…peaceful abundance. A generosity without announcement.

Last summer the heat came hard and stayed. The drought followed. I watched every fern on this land go brown, shrivel, curl inward, and die. I watched it happen slowly enough to witness and fast enough to hurt.

I didn’t look away.

And here we are. First real weeks of spring.

They’re coming back up.

All of them.

There is something I am supposed to learn from this. Or maybe not learn. Learning implies I didn’t already know. Maybe the fern is just reminding me.

That the body can go brown and still hold its root.

That disappearing is not the same as dying.

That coming back doesn’t announce itself. It just arrives… small, tender, uncurling out of the ground like a question becoming an answer.

We’ll see how they fare this year. So much is uncertain. The heat hasn’t finished with us.

But the ferns came back once.

That’s the kind of information I hold close.

-Natalie

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