#hidden alphabet

[myblurrydreams]

[corvi-art]

ᚘ Devil’s Club

Devil’s club is completely armored by fragile yellow thorns that tend to break off under skin when touched. Even the leaves are thorny. Devil’s club is sometimes planted as a park fence, it’s more effective than barbed wire.

I am caution.

I am good judgement, the sort that only comes from having had bad judgement first and picking spines out of your hands.

[corvi-art]

ᚗ Wild Ginger

Wild ginger is a creeping ground plant with a spice-scented stalk, glossy green leaves, and strange urn-shaped flowers. Wild Ginger flowers are low to the ground and appear early in the year. Wild Ginger’s pollination technique is to provide shelter from winter winds to small insects, who huddle inside the flowers and move pollen to the next flower as they go.

I am shelter from the cold. Not forever, but a week, a day, seven heartbeats. Long enough to matter.

Whatever small shelter you can give to someone else: it is enough to help.

[corvi-art]

ᚖ Trillium

Trilliums have no leaves. They have a three-petaled flower, inside a three- petaled bud, above three more petals that are green and photosynthesize like leaves. They’re cobbled together from the wrong parts, botanically speaking, but they still appear like magic every spring.

I am an impossible task accomplished with the wrong tools. I am duct tape and baling wire and photosynthetic bracts.

[corvi-art]

ᚕ Sitka Spruce

Young spruce have the classic dense Christmas tree shape, but they live for hundreds of years and become scarred and strange. When storms break off the top, other branches turn and grow vertically to replace it.

Marbled Murrelets are small seabirds that live out at sea on the open water, but return to the forest to lay eggs. They nest in the corners of scarred spruces with replacement tops. Young perfect trees are no good to them.

I am marked with the story of the storms I have survived.

This thing I have learned: wisdom is a small white bird that alights in the places our scars let light in, and gazes golden-eyed out at the sea.

[corvi-art]

ᚔ Pacific Yew

A slow-growing and ageless tree. Probably the same species as the English Yew, which can live for thousands of years.

Estimating the age of a yew is difficult because you cannot count the rings; yews continue growing new branches with green needles and red berries from the hollow shell of the bark even after the center has long rotted away.

I am what does not die.

Even after the center has crumbled, even after you have gone, nothing undoes the good you have done in the lives of others, and from your touch grow branches with soft green needles and red berries.

[corvi-art]

ᚓ Quaking Aspen

During the most recent Ice Age, quaking aspens with pale trunks and golden fall color flourished across Western North America. As the ice age ended, the climate got too warm for them to flower or produce seeds in the Southern half of their range.

They remain here only in patches due to clonal propagation: the roots of an aspen tree can grow a second trunk, genetically identical to the first tree, some distance away. The world’s largest organism is a single Quaking Aspen with fifty thousand trunks.

I am defiance of destiny. My time has passed, and still I remain, white and gold upon the hillside. No one need follow what the stars have written.

[corvi-art]

ᚒ Rhododendron

Rhododendrons have spectacular flowers to attract honeybees, but their nectar contains grayanotoxins. These neurotoxins don’t affect bees, but the dark red honey made from rhododendron nectar is called “mad honey,” and causes hallucination in humans.

I am the honey you eat in dreams, I am the honey-wine dreamers drink.

I am food for those who dream some strange impossible thing and pull it out into the waking world to mark the universe.