Last year I received an orchid as a housewarming gift.  I loved its sculptural white petals, its crazy interior blush of pinks, its odd thrusting roots that reached like tentacles out of the pot.  The flowers lasted for a long time, weeks of unchanging perfect white blooms.  When at last the petals were spent, I sadly clipped them back and then gave little thought to the plant, setting it out of way on my kitchen counter. 

I'm terrible with house plants really.  I have a scraggly palm that has been uprooted in turn by each of my three children during their toddler-doms and has been watered so few times in the decade  I've had it that its pot must register as one of the world's driest micro-climates.  I appreciate this palm for its tenacity and its willingness to continue with life even after a toddler has uprooted it and paraded around the house with it clenched between grubby fingers.  All other house plants I have managed to kill, or give away to more green-thumbed friends as they were respiring their last. 

So it was a pleasant surprise when the orchid that had been unobtrusively holding its own on the kitchen counter, sent up two light green buds.  I watched it, trying to give it a little love but not wanting to overwhelm it with sudden attention and over the course of weeks it turned those buds into the same glorious petals and nearly everlasting whiteness that it shared with us last year.  I know all about how nature does its thing from seed to seed without our midwifery, and I know that in the strictest sense, this manifestation of the drive to reproduce isn't miraculous, it is just the way things are... but all the same, I like being present at this non-miracle unfolding on my counter, casting its halo light in little discs, embrightening my day.       

Here's another little creature that brightens my day: