Thorns

Going into Bramble Season

Lauren Kolyn

Drizzly. A few islands of snow thawed and re-frozen into clumps of crusty little beads, the sky as colourless as milk, the landscape not yet woken up but we are past the soft muffled landscape of deep winter now. In-between weather. Scrublands. If there is colour to be found, it’s in a shrivelled wild rosehip or the orangey stain of an old brown leaf on grainy white snow, or a lacy green-grey pancake of lichen on a fallen branch, but that’s about it. Mostly everything is washed out, damp, cold, and waiting. When colour recedes you see in shapes. This slack landscape almost asks you to go nowhere in particular. Do not try to find anything. Let yourself get pulled towards certain shapes. Go over the rushing stream and up the hill, and there, just off to the side of the path, a bush on its own.

You’ve noticed it before, a remember or a dream of last summer. It was there and it asked you to climb the hill and go back to it and then, in the naked air of late winter, now you see that smaller thorns grow out of the longer thorns. Collect them. Put them on a plate in a pile and so that they become sculpture and architecture. And still they hold your thoughts. That pile on the plate is only a scaled model. Leave them in the rain to drip, they know how to intensify. A thorn comes to a point. Its finest tip channels and defines and sacrimentalizes time. Each drip of water. It is sharp. It marks. Whang Od in the hills with the pomelo thorn and ashes pushed under the skin for the warrior. Andy Goldsworthy pinning reeds together in a hanging poem-frame to the sky. And long before that, it slowed the path of the horned tobacco caterpillar. It thinks in hungry. It’s the shape of the hole of the trumpet in the scattered forrest of your dreams where you saw the brindled coyote. It makes you bleed. It is a fairytale sleep drug that needles in every direction covering the whole sapling. There is a nest deep this thornbush. What sort of bird needs this much protection and how it angled itself in there with all those spikes. A soft heart. A song across the milky morning to the hungry baby chicks in their bed. See it on a walk in the rain at the side of the hill going up to the white cliff and come back to it later and behind it there will be more like it.

INKTEST: Apple, Thorn, Berry

There are many kinds of trees with thorns, but the honey locust is the one you will need. Or blackthorn. Wild prune rose. Devil’s stick. A graduation tower that slowly intensifies sea wind and rain into brine branching forever into the soft crystals of salt. Electrical snapping as each drop makes twists its way through the upsidedown thicket. Lofty pile to the sky. Salt conducts electricity. A battery humming. A thorn house.

Hope your weekend is full of adventures,

Jason

and….

Don’t miss The Colour Lab today which includes Shop the story and a new activity! (look at these beautiful examples of FLAGS OF PLACE from the mini-course below from Jess Roller and Justine Jenkins.