I have a resurrection plant. I sometimes call it a resurrection fern, even though I know that’s a different plant entirely; mine is Selaginella lepidophylla, a club-moss native to the American Southwest, while true resurrection ferns are Polypoidium polypolioides, native to the American South. But both the moss and the fern, as well as a few other plants in the world, perform the same incredible feat: they return to life from the brink of death.
Both resurrection moss and fern live with little to begin with. The moss is a desert plant, sometimes called flor de piedra, the stone flower. During periods of drought, the resurrection plant curls up into a tight little fist, brown and nearly desiccated, for all appearances dead. It becomes a tumbleweed, rolling with the desert wind in search of the next patch of mud. Finding something to drink, a remarkable change takes place: its cells rehydrate in a mere hour or two, and the fist opens into a hand. A few hours later, it becomes green again. The dormant machinery that powers it, all the organelles of its chloroplasts, revive and whir into action. Sunlight becomes sunlight again. Just a kiss of moisture, and it walks out of its own grave. The resurrection plant may tumble around the desert lifelessly for a century waiting for such a blessing.
The resurrection fern, on the other hand, has a different approach. It lives in the humid swamps of the South as an epiphyte. I have seen them in Florida, carpeting themselves on the shelf-like branches of live oaks, waiting for rain. They are air plants, and their roots exist mainly to grasp the ragged bark. Living above the soil, they take everything they need from the air. They draw moisture from the muggy Southern atmosphere and nutrients from settling dust. But when the air is dry, they fold up and play dead, a garden of brown and quiet coral. They are not vagabonds, drifters, or seekers. They are simply patient, praying quietly for the monsoon to visit so that they can fill their empty cups.
I have a resurrection plant. I keep it because it reminds me of happier times. I keep it because I love novelty creatures: ant farms, sea monkey colonies, venus flytrap terrariums. I keep it in part because, despite that I was a botany student and an urban forester, I cannot even keep a cactus alive in my house, and this is the one green thing I cannot kill. But mainly I keep to remind me that not everything that appears dead is so. Resurrection plants are like memories: seemingly forgotten, sometimes a mere mention of water is all it takes for them to become remembered. Resurrection plants are like old wounds: Stubborn and persistent, cottonmouthed and whispering, refusing to be starved to death, fully empowered with a millimeter of water. And resurrection plants are like hearts: some tumble and some wait. Some eat the air. And some pack everything away into sawdust during the long dry journey, until they seem to have flatlined and the machinery no longer works and the doctors want to give up on them and move on. Yet within their DNA is packaged a thing humans call hope, and the world, if the world could speak, would call a trait for survival, and the universe, if the universe could speak, would call a second chance.
And sometimes it fails. Sometimes the resurrection plant rolls into an irrigation ditch and blooms only to drown. Somewhere on the Rio Grande is a resurrection plant that unfurled in the muddy water and is floating out to the ocean like an ugly lotus. And once, in New Mexico, a sleeping moss awoke to find itself in a wine glass of water on some poet’s coffee table, admired as a metaphor but doomed to never plant its spores in the good earth. But that never diminishes the miracle of the thing. Unlike almost any other living creature on earth, which thirsts and thirsts until its cells pucker and petrify, the resurrection plant continues on though its insides are as good as wet stone. It lives only in the good times. It hardly knows thirst, because it is only conscious when it is satisfied. It lives on snapshots of rain. It lives like a boiling kettle, flourishing with steam until it runs dry and goes silent, waiting to be refilled. Perhaps it’s not the way you’d want to live, near-dead instead of suffering, packing its precious existence into a suitcase until the moment presents itself to explode its clothes all over the room. A hundred years without tasting water and sunlight may be too long a sentence for the human heart and too high a price for a long life. But in the long run, it always cheers me to know that what is lost may be rediscovered no matter how far gone it may seem. What is starved may yet grow fat. What is imprisoned may yet go free. What seems dead may still ring the bell, roll the rock back, and say, I only needed this small offering to be myself. It is enough. This little gift is enough.