Adaptive Strategies for Human Weakness from Tiny Titans of Nature's Tenacity – The Marginalian

When I was a child, nothing made me happier than the magical green flowers from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the Bulgarian mountains like little Orlando. I didn't know that He adds longissima it's just one of more than 20,000 known species of algae—almost twice as many as birds.

In the lifetime since then, I have collected and photographed the dead all over the world, from tree trunks lining the wild coast of Alaska to stone walls lining the roads of rural Ireland, from Basquiat's grave in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn to my young husband's tombstone in Brompton Cemetery in London. And because anything you polish with attention will be a mirror, I've come to realize that you know a lot of things that we spend our lives learning – about hardship, about belonging, about love.

Here are some life lessons gleaned from nature's youngest titans of fitness:

It consists of masses that have no internal conflict. Linnaeus classified the plants as plants – an idea no one questioned until Peter Rabbit the creator Beatrix Potter did her little-known scientific studies and found the evolution that algae is part algae and part fungus, with the spray of bacteria – three kingdoms of life in one thing, which do not fight for dominance but work together to make it one of the most resistant life forms in nature and the main stone of many organisms. That's what the German biologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the term. symbiosiswhich is an evolutionary technology designed to ignore them.

Roots are overcrowded – establish other related structures. Algae do not have roots to absorb nutrients and moisture from the soil. Instead, they alchemize sunlight into sugar, using their part of the plant to photosynthesize and their part of the fungus to grow rhizines like roots that allow them to stick to almost any surface – house walls and tree bark, dead bones and living barnacles – to draw moisture and nutrients from the air. This allows them to thrive in many amazing environments – from tidal pools to mountain tops, from the hottest desert to the frozen ground.

Cultivate a healthy attachment that does not drain the other person. Contrary to common misconception, lichens do not parasitize the organisms they grow on but simply use them as a substrate and generally contribute to the overall health of the ecosystem.

Be a potential pioneer among the ancient ruins. Lichens are often the first organisms to grow in bare rock left behind after landslides and earthquakes. They are life that lives on over the tombstones of the dead.

When you can't change your situation, change your attitude. When environmental conditions become harsh, lichens can shut down their bodies for months, years, or even decades. They live in radioactive environments by entering the silent zone and secreting protective chemicals that block radiation and neutralize free radicals. They survived simulations of Martian conditions and even the dark dimensions of outer space: When a group of Spanish scientists sent a common map lichen. Rhizocarpon geographicum and a bright orange miracle Russian elegance a Russian spaceship that would be exposed to cosmic radiation for 15 days, the lichens returned to Earth anxiously and resumed their reproductive cycles.

Know that you don't need a partner to fulfill your life. Many lichens reproduce in an unusual way – by dispersing diaspores containing a number of cells from each of their internal kingdoms or by breaking off their fragments to grow into new organisms.

Leave the world better than you found it. Lichens enrich the soil of deserts, stabilize sand dunes, and create loam from rock over the long arc of their lives. They are part of how the mountains become golden sand.

Be very patient with the arc of your life. One of the oldest living things on Earth, leeches grow at a slow rate of less than a millimeter per year. The continent I live on now and the continent I was born on are more than 250 times apart. The Moon leaves us four hundred times faster.

Become a living poem. Lichen captures one of the most subtle, powerful poems ever written – Elizabeth Bishop's way of time and love reflected in the gray hair of the love of her life, Brazilian architect and landscape designer Lota de Macedo Soares:

SHAMPOO
by Elizabeth Bishop

The explosion still erupts in the rocks,
sleep, let it grow
with a diffuse, gray, concentric shock.
They are ready
meet the rings around the moon, though
in our memories they have not changed.

And as the heavens will travel
long time for us,
presence, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatic;
and watch what happens. Because Time
nothing if it doesn't happen.

Shooting stars in your black hair
in light formation
they flock there,
you mean, soon?
– Come, let me wash you in this big basin,
beaten and shining like the moon.