A feisty lone dandelion repeatedly visits me every year through the space between two bricks on my front porch:  top step, far left.  A wild little violet does a similar annual pop-up-and-peek-in at my back door.  In fact, an entire line of wild violets joins hands along a crack in the cement that stretches across my driveway like children skipping to a birthday party.

So I know that nature finds a way – to power through and survive, to connect with us and make us smile in awe, to delight and surprise and encourage us, in even the most unexpected places, under the most improbable circumstances.  And yet, a magnolia tree in my own backyard has just captivated me beyond expectation, as if for the first time.

Hurricane Helene started it all.  She brought down a large, old-growth magnolia tree that had stood guard for decades on the far northeast corner of my property.  The storm left this beautiful giant flailing its roots like a twirly skirt lifted and splayed skyward, scattering other plants and patio bricks like confetti in its wake.  The tree’s head came to rest on the roof of the house.  And so, a crew of men came and cut the magnolia into bits and pieces and carried them all away.  All except for the upturned root stump – which was left as a playhouse for the dogs.  The workers also left a large, separate, severed section of the trunk, lying prone on the ground, next to the dogs’ tree-root hideout.  Disconnected and unattached, this hefty log is about five feet long and two feet across.  Dog Daphne has been enjoying it as an added climbing perch and lookout.  And I simply assumed that, in time, both of these leftovers would cover themselves in moss and ivy and vines and such, and decompose back into the ground, returning to the earth as nature’s nutrients.

What I didn’t expect was the “magic” bit.  It’s been slightly more than a year now, and that one segment of entirely separate decomposing trunk is actually beginning to grow into a tree again.  More specifically, it has mothered at least four new baby trees out of its broken self – with no roots of its own, no existing branches, no external prompting.  (Magic.)

Perhaps it is no small coincidence that a magnolia plant symbolizes perseverance, known by even ancient cultures as elegant endurance.  It’s older than dinosaurs (and outlived them).  It has survived ice ages, volcanoes, catastrophic collisions with space debris, and continental drifts.  It invented a way of pollination for itself that pre-dates bees and butterflies.  It can be eaten by animals and humans alike.  It provides healing for ailments like anxiety and insomnia, arthritis and upset tummies, trouble breathing and troubled skin.  And it thrives all over the globe.  With such a fulsome backstory, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this one act of unexpected current-day resilience. 

But it does remind me of how important it can be right now to sometimes turn our thoughts and avert our souls away from the everyday mangling of humanity and nature that is going on in our current world affairs.  How necessary it can be to look for the magic still happening all around us – there for the seeking, just waiting to be noticed.  Especially that magic that proves the opportunities for perseverance and exemplifies endurance.  After all, it doesn’t require us to care less.  It simply allows us to see more dandelions and to count more wild violets and to open our imaginations to “be more magnolia.”  A reminder to celebrate the possibilities  – with renewed wonder and revived hope, a rebirth of gratitude.  Not unlike the wisdom and magic of my old, regrowing, magnolia tree.