myth for bull thistle

The little yellow cats were curled all around the witch’s meadow. They were once pumas but the witch preferred them small. She liked the taste of mice and frogs in her soup, so these cats were the perfect companion hunters for her. She preferred the land to rise up around her. She preferred the trees thick and brambled with little light making it to the underbrush. So it was always a soft twilight in the forest. She told the wind to stop coming around. When she was younger she sent messages on its back, and she would received beautiful cloud patterns, rains, sometimes flower petals and flocks of birds came to visit her, but for over four hundred years nothing came back. She stopped calling to the wind. She didn’t want it to come back. She made night in the forest , she wrapped herself in hills and was companion to once-pumas. Eventually, however, even these pumas ambled away. They were sick of her sadness.

She did not want to contain them through spells. So the witch was left with the echoes of bird song and the sweep of grasses on her skirts. Her solitude made her sink into the ground as she slowed to imperceptible movement. Each thought of resentment and anger, each bit of shame for changing kings to toads and pumas to cats and princesses to pages of books made spikes extend from her body.

But there was one part of her that could not, no matter how awful she felt, could not be transformed into a sharp weapon. It was the top of her head where her purple hair was wound. There the sun embraced her in good warm hands and the moon crowned her every night in an ever changing headdress. Three of the cats returned one day from over the hills and far away and found their witch was a thistle. They wept because they could not come near her and their tears softened the earth and she brought the water up from her roots and translated their tears into a loving sweet nectar. Now the bull thistle is brought messages from birds and bees who feast from the nectar in her purple hairs.

And it is said that if you should sew a quilt with her many needles you will find that there will be a home in it, safe, open, and sweet. Though you would not know it by looking, this is what she became.