Touching grass isn't enough
I need to dwell in the micro habitat of a 4 million year old moss
The forest in a rainstorm shines neon green with lichen and moss. My hiking boots make squishy footprints in the red clay earth as I walk alone in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, under a canopy of Oracle Oaks and Ponderosa Pines, amongst the Whiteleaf Manzanita and Mountain Mahogany in their inchoate stage of bloom. I lay my hand against an oak trunk and feel an ancient, primordial pulse emanating from the mossy cloak it wears; the totality of existence rests against my palm.
When I need direction of any kind, I look to nature to show me the way. The trees and the tributaries are my gurus, my compass, my guides. Today, as I walk these woods carrying the burden of collective grief with bones made heavy from the rigors of late stage capitalism, I ask the mosses for their wisdom in navigating this particular point on the timeline. I offer a blessing before asking for one in return, according to the laws of the honorable harvest—there isn’t much I can give the mosses besides my reverence, which pours from me in torrents, but there is much it can provide me, an abundance of lessons to be learned from one of nature’s oldest organisms.
They remind me, as always, to go slow and drink water, to reject urgency and find value in stillness, to remain unyielding in my commitment to softness, not to harden myself in the face of harsh conditions. Mosses are highly absorbent and slow growing, imbibing minerals and moisture through rain and any external water sources they can pull from, taking their time as they germinate spores and produce rhizoids. They are not in a hurry, and I endeavor to match their pace.
They encourage me to be adaptable as they grow in places that are otherwise uninhabitable for life, occupying mountainsides and rocky outcrops, photosynthesizing in temperatures that range from 5 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. If subjected to extremely high temperatures they will become dormant by desiccating themselves, after which they can reawaken with a drop of water, sometimes after hundreds of years of hibernation.
The Dragon’s Gold moss grows in luminescent in caves—a biological coping adaptation to living with the barest amount of light. They show us that malleability is essential to survival, that rest is viable strategy.
They embody the virtue of resilience, having survived every drastic climate change on the planet thus far. Mosses exist on every continent and in all ecosystems where photosynthesizing plants live. They are resistant to drought and UV radiation.
Takakia, a type of moss that carpets the Tibetan Plateau, has persisted through mass extinctions and asymmetric glacial periods, enduring each subsequent age of our planet’s cooling and warming, outlasting non-avian dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, and saber toothed tigers. It was here when giant sloths walked the Earth and it will remain long after the bones of the last humans have baked in the heat of our central star.
Mosses have lived for at least 450 million years and they will not be extinguished. Keep going, they whisper into my open palm. Do not go gentle into that dystopian nightmare. Rage against the dying of all that is good and right.1
But perhaps most significant of all the gentle reminders the moss will bestow upon me today is one of reciprocity, just like the flowers and the bees, just like you, just like me. They are mutually facilitative, creating humid conditions that allow for other plant life around them to thrive, contributing to soil health, protecting the roots of trees from high temperatures, and providing microhabitats for invertebrates and even moss piglets—one of the smallest known animals with legs. When an area of the forest is disturbed by fire or exploitative human intervention, they help develop new ecosystems by being among the first forms of life to reappear, stabilizing the surface of the soil. Mosses quite literally establish a base for new life to emerge.
Survival, the mosses tell me, is not a solitary struggle. No one withstands the tempest it alone. We build bridges and hold up ladders. We offer sanctuary in homes and in hearts. We extend our resources, our empathy, our hands. We weather the storm together, and together we’ll prevail.
A little bit of everything,
Neghar
An adaptation of two lines from the poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” by Dylan Thomas