wren blue

really love keeping up with my mutuals through their little tags and vent posts. getting updates on how they’re doing is something like: glad to know your job at the library is going well. i’m sorry you haven’t gotten that raise. glad your finals went well. i’m sorry your teacher is so unhelpful. glad your tv show got renewed. i’m sorry they killed your favorite character. glad that you scored tickets to see your favorite artist. i’m sorry they aren’t touring near you at all. glad your cat is doing well. i’m sorry your mom is sick again. glad you’re feeling better now that it’s your favorite season. i’m sorry your meds aren’t working. glad you’re married now. i’m sorry you have to step back for your mental health. glad you’re still here. i’m sorry life is so hard. glad you’re alive, i hope things get easier for you soon

ID: a digital painting of a white griffon silhouette perched on top of the chimney of a tan brick house, looking down at the white silhouettes of birds below them. the sky is blue. end ID

it’s crazy to me that every seed in existence is a little chemical computer taking readings of temperature and moisture and minerals and all that to see if it’s able to grow yet and they’re doing crazy stuff like going into full dormancy and waiting for species-specific conditions etc etc and some seeds will do this in the size of a dust particle (see: orobanche) and some will pack in extra starch and food and do it in the size of a coconut or something… just dissected this flower seed at work that was a woody two-compartment capsule with one embryo per compartment, the whole seed a little smaller than a dime, and I swear to god it had a full soybean’s worth of embryo and food packed in there. it’s just unfathomable to me

sometimes a seed strikes me as being like a little spaceship with on-board life support and stuff. all that’s inherently certain about a seed’s existence is that its parents survived nearby, presumably, so if all goes well it’ll be set up for some kind of success falling where it falls, but ideally the seed won’t see those exact conditions, because being too close could also hurt the seed’s chances of survival… as could being too far away, like if it ends up in a different habitat or ecosystem and the right conditions never happen. The whole food-on-board strategy was a huge buff when they patched it in after ferns and other spore-bearing plants, but it’s still basically outer space, right? Just deploying a hundred ships to different planets in the same star system, hoping it’s not so different down there that it’s unsurvivable? like every seed is a chance and different plants are putting different amounts of food, effort, and strategy into those chances. so you get a million different seeds from a million different species and they all look and act different from the ground up. you know what I mean, man. you know what I’m sayin