I looked at a tree in my yard (one that I have seen a million of times) last week and almost cried.
Not because anything was wrong. Not because I was having a hard moment or needed a good release. Just because I looked at it … really looked at it and something in me was just completely humbled. Like I was seeing a tree for the first time (kinda like my baby). Like I had been walking past trees my entire life and only just now understood what one actually is.
I have always loved nature. Always been drawn to it, moved by it, grounded by it. This is not new. And yet something has shifted since becoming a mother that I am still finding words for.
I think it's this: I have been living so close to miracles (creating and sustaining life with my very own body) that I can no longer look at anything without seeing the miracle inside it.
Here is what I mean.
Birch (my daughter) was made from a sperm and an egg. Two microorganisms so small you cannot see them. And somehow… somehow those two things contained everything. Every instruction. Every blueprint. Every piece of information needed to become a human being with eyelashes and a cute little butt chin and rolls on her thighs and a specific way of looking at me that I would recognize anywhere. Nobody told those cells what to do. They already knew.
And then, she drinks only my milk. That is the only thing she takes in. And she has tripled her birth weight.
I am so close to the impossible ordinary that the line between mundane and miraculous has thinned in a way I couldn't have imagined.
And so when I look at a tree now … a tree that has been doing something extraordinary quietly and without acknowledgment for decades, maybe centuries I see it. I actually see it.
This spring especially. After the darkness, a postpartum, the cold, the smallness of the world when you are mostly indoors. Then all of a sudden the world bloomed and you feel the "omg we made it."
So there I was standing in it with new eyes and a body that had been through something and a heart that was and will continue to be cracked open in the best and hardest way.
I have never felt the reflection of nature's seasons in my own life so clearly. It feels like watching the trees breathing and having the quality of presence you dream of having. It's the feeling of being on mushrooms but being totally sober. Totally awe struck. Everything feels so big. So beautiful. So alive.
I wonder if this is what happens when you become a witness to miracles up close? Not the grand but the quiet, cellular, everyday kind that we walk past without stopping. A sperm and an egg becoming a person. A tree becoming oxygen. A winter becoming spring. A woman becoming a mother and then standing in her backyard in April completely in awe over a tree.
Maybe the miracle was always there (it was). Maybe I just needed the right eyes to see it (and they are here right now).
I hope you find something today that gives you that feeling. Something ordinary that stops you. Something you have walked past a hundred times that suddenly looks like what it actually is.
Look up. Look around. It's all doing something extraordinary.
It always has been.