The Magic of Moss and What It Teaches Us About the Art of Observing Life in All Dimensions – The Marginalian

“Attention without feeling,” observes Mary Oliver in her beautiful book of love and loss, “is just reporting.” In Collecting Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (public library) – an extraordinary celebration of the smallness and splendor of life, humble yet as magical as its subject – the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer it conveys an extraordinary and infectious invitation to drink in the movement of life in all dimensions and to pay attention to our world with the right vibration of feeling.

One of the world's leading bryologists, Kimmerer is a scientist blessed with the rare privilege of being part of a long lineage of storytellers – his family descends from the Bear Clan of the Potawatomi. There is a special similarity between his heritage and his scientific training – a deep respect for all forms of life, regardless of size – accompanied by a special ability to render that respect into something contagious, which puts his prose in the same taxon as Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard and Thoreau. Indeed, if Thoreau was the poet and philosopher he became de facto an environmentalist with great powers of observation, despite formal scientific training, Kimmerer is a formally trained scientist whose powers of observation and reflection make him de facto poet and philosopher. (So ​​witchcraft is his book, in fact, that inspired a beautiful novel by Elizabeth Gilbert Signature for All Items(which is how I first became aware of Kimmerer's artwork.)

Mosses are, of course, scientifically incomparably impressive – green aquatic animals, they were among the first plants to emerge from the sea and conquer the land; they have about 22,000 species, their greatest range being the difference in height between a blueberry tree and a redwood; they live in almost every ecosystem in the world and grow in places as diverse as an oak branch and a beetle's back. But beyond their scientific notoriety, mosses have a kind of lyrical splendor that Kimmerer reveals with incredible beauty — a splendor that has to do with what these tiny creatures teach about the art of seeing.

He uses the experience of flying – an experience so common that we take its wonders for granted – to illustrate all of our human considerations:

Between departure and arrival, we are each in suspended animation, a moment between chapters of our lives. As we gaze out the window into the sunlight, the surrounding landscape is nothing but flat with mountains reduced to wrinkles in the skin of the continent. Neglecting our passage above, other stories are unfolding beneath us. The berries ripen in the August sun; a woman packs a suitcase and hesitates at her door; the book opens and the most amazing picture slides from between the pages. But we are moving too fast and too far; all matters escape us, except our own.

Of course, we don't have to go up to the skies to fall into the endless patterns of our myopia and miss so much of what's going on around us – we do this even in the ordinary microcosm of a city block. Kimmerer looks at how our growing capacity for technology-assisted viewing has contributed to our shrinking attention span:

We poor people, don't have the raptor's gift for long distance perception, or the housefly's talents for good vision. However, with our big brains, we at least know the limits of our vision. With a degree of humility rare for our species, we admit that there is much we cannot see, so we create amazing ways of looking at the world. Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubble Space Telescope bring dimensions within our sphere of vision. Electron microscopes allow us to peer into the far reaches of our cells. But on the average scale, that of the eye alone, our senses seem incredibly dull. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see beyond ourselves, but we often don't see the myriad of glowing parts that are so close. We think we are to see where we are only scratching the surface. Our intelligence in this average measure seems to be diminished, not by the failure of the eyes, but by the determination of the mind. Has the power of our machines caused us to distrust our naked eyes? Or have we discarded that which requires no expertise but only time and patience to see? Attention alone can withstand a very powerful magnifying lens.

But the rewards of attention cannot be forced to appear – rather, they are offered. With a sense reminiscent of Rebecca Solnit's wonderful story of how we find ourselves by being lost, Kimmerer writes:

A Cheyenne elder I knew once told me that the best way to find something is to ask for it. This is a difficult concept for a scientist. But he said watch out of the corner of your eye, open to possibility, and what you want will be revealed. The revelation of seeing suddenly that I was blind a few minutes ago is a great experience for me. I can revisit those moments and feel the surge of expansion. The boundaries between my world and someone else's world are suddenly pushed back with clarity in a humbling and exhilarating experience.

[…]

Mosses and other small creatures issue an invitation to linger for a while at the limits of ordinary vision. What you need from us is to listen carefully. Look a certain way and a whole new world can be revealed.

[…]

Learning to see moss is more like listening than watching. Just looking won't do it. Starting to hear a distant voice or a faint catch in the quiet subtext of a conversation requires listening carefully, sifting through all the noise, to catch the music. Mosses are not elevator music; they are the twisted strings of Beethoven's quartet.

Echoing Richard Feynman's monologue of knowledge and mystery, Kimmerer adds:

Knowing the broken geometry of each snowflake makes the winter landscape magical. Knowing moss improves our knowledge of the world.

This knowing is, more closely, a naming task – because words are how we know meanings. Kimmerer observes this critical dialogue between the essence of a thing and its name:

Having names for these forms makes the difference between them more clear. With the words you have, you can see clearly. Finding words is another step in learning to see.

[…]

Having words creates an intimacy with the plant that speaks through careful observation.

[…]

Proximity gives us a different way of seeing, when good vision is not enough.

The incredible diversity of moss species known and named only adds to the power of intimacy with the earth on all dimensions. But among this proliferation of mosses there is a certain species that lives in small caves carved by glaciers on the shores of the lake, the only ones that show great wisdom about the mystery and meaning of life. Kimmerer writes:

Schistostega pennataGoblin Gold, unlike any other moss. It is a paragon of minimalism, simple in ways, rich in ends. It's so light you might not even notice it as moss at all. The common moss on the shore outside spreads itself out to meet the sun. Strong leaves and shoots, although small, require a large amount of solar energy to form and maintain. They cost the sun money. Some mosses need full sun to survive, others prefer diffuse light from clouds, while Schistostega he lives on the silver lining of the clouds alone.

This singular species survives only on light from the surface of the lake, which provides one-tenth of a percent of the sun's energy directly available. And yet in this impossible place, Schistostega appeared as the most miraculous gem of life:

The shining presence of Schistostega it is created entirely by the interweaving of almost invisible threads that run across the surface of the moist soil. It shines in the dark, or rather it shines in the light that is part of the places where the sun never hears.

Each fiber is a string of individual cells strung together like shiny beads on a string. The walls of each cell have angles, forming internal parts like a cut diamond. These are the factors that cause it Schistostega twinkling like the small lights of a distant city. These finely angled walls capture traces of light and focus them inside, where a single giant chloroplast awaits a ray of light. Covered by a highly complex chlorophyll membrane, the chloroplast converts light energy into a stream of flowing electrons. This is the electricity of photosynthesis, which turns sunlight into sugar, spins grass into gold.

But beyond the wonders of life, Schistostega it presents an example of patience and its great rewards – an example of meeting the world not with great privilege but with unlimited generosity; by taking whatever it gives and giving back infinitely more. Kimmerer writes:

Rain outside, fire inside. I feel a connection to this person whose cold light is so different from mine. It asks very little of the world but sparkles in response.

[…]

Timing is everything. For a moment, in the silence before the world turns back into night, the cave is filled with light. The emptiness of Schistostega a shower of glitter erupts, like green glitter spilled on a carpet at Christmas… Then, in a few minutes, it's gone. All its needs are met in a short time at the end of the day when the sun coincides with the mouth of the cave… Each shoot is feather-shaped, flat and soft. The soft blue leaves stand like a glade of bright ferns, tracing the path of the sun. It's very small. But that's enough.

This little moss is a master of “patience of light” – and what is the greatest act of the human spirit, the measure of a life well lived, if not “the glimmer of the light of patience”? Annie Dillard knew this when she wrote: “I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the way of its light.” And Carl Jung knew it when he insisted that “the sole purpose of human existence is to shine light in the darkness of mere man.” Humble, generous Schistostega illuminates the darkness of great fear with the miracle of life itself – a reminder that our existence on this amazing rock orbiting a strange star is a glorious cosmic danger, a great realization that reminds us of the words of the poet Mark Strand: “This is a great danger, as we were born, that we are forced to pay attention to.”

Attention, indeed, is the ultimate celebration of this accidental miracle of life. Kimmerer captures this with delightful beauty:

The combination of circumstances that allow it to exist at all is so incredible Schistostega it is made more precious than gold. Goblins' or otherwise. Its existence depends not only on the meeting angle of the cave with the sun, but if the hills on the west coast were too high the sun would set before it reached the cave… Their life and ours exist because of a number of harmonious factors that bring us to this place at this time. To receive such a gift, the only reasonable response is to glare in response.

Gathering Moss it's a brilliant read overall. Fill it with Annie Dillard's visual arts and two perspectives.