Moss

Carpets of green coat our forest, flowing over rock and downed trees.  I’ve come to enjoy the shapes it creates in the underbrush, softening rough edges and adding luxurious color and texture to the browns of the forest floor.  Even in winter, the green continues.  I learned mosses produce a chemical that keeps them from freezing—they like the cold! They are the “other” evergreen on our property.

In some small hollows, filled with the bodies of limestone rock, the air seems alive with the scent of moss. They absorb the sounds of my breath, hushing me, teaching me the joy of being small and still. With no roots to cling to the rocks, no interior structures that bring water out into the leaves, they are simple Yogis of the plant world, living on what the air brings them. Their far kin would have felt dinosaurs slide by, would have sipped the air of a new world before the development of their more complex plant kingdom kin.

They endure.

I run my hand over their surface, gentle, respectful.  Rock, with a living skin. Without moisture, moss wilts and dries, but add the moisture back and it will spring alive again, unfurling and greening. There are times when I feel like dried moss.  It counsels me to be patient, to wait for fogs and rain to fatten my inner self up again, stretching my spine and wiggling out into my fingertips. 

But the sedentary soft endurance of moss is not the whole story. They reproduce using spores, which can be caught up in the winds that circle our globe, waiting to find the right conditions to birth a new life.  The moss rests not just on rock but on the jet stream, rushing, tumbling, floating down and buoyed up.  In order to grow, it must fly for a time. In order to create, it must find stillness and moisture.

May I learn to trust such cycles.