Community Bow

I almost missed them. The fiddleheads are pushing up through the damp earth and are well on their way to fern fronds. I stumbled upon them the other evening and they immediately stopped me.

It is a sacred moment to catch life in the act and art of unfurling. The fiddleheads posture seems to underscore stillness with their tight spirals frozen in a slice of time.

But don’t be fooled. Blink a few times or walk away and come back in a few hours and everything will have changed. Don’t confuse the atmosphere of stillness with hesitation. There is no hesitation in their manner of claiming the life space that is theirs. The ferns are bold in their placement of greening presence.

On the south side of the Hummingbird House the ferns are already fully out as you can see in the opening photo. That is where we planted them years ago. They now have moved around both corners and are coming up on the west and east sides. They are on the move. The images below are from the east side where the new growth is coming up later than on the south.

What struck me this year is how they were emerging. They come up in groups. Their thick stalks form a circle and in each circle the spirals are unfurling the same way.

Within each circle their heads offer the appearance of bowing to each other—bowing into the center of the circle. It creates an atmosphere of reverence. Surely this ground is holy and I didn’t know it.

The experience opened in me a series of questions:

How do we build a bridge between beings that we, in our ignorance, destroyed?
How do we come to a renewed reverence for all beings?
How can our posturing return us to the bow of respect?
How do we release dominant notions of communication and communion and dare to speak and listen in a manner that honors the life force that pulses in all of creation?

The fiddleheads seem in synch with T. S. Eliot:

...We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation…
--T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets

Love and Peace, Glenn