Gathering Moss

The near-nothingness of Schistostega erupts in a shower of sparkles, like green glitter spilled on the rug at Christmas.

Here is every single thing I need. And it is precious little: rain on the outside, fire on the inside. And soup. And the rest is luxury. Especially curtains.

Why would a person hang curtains in the wilderness? To shut out starlight on a black, black night? To prevent the looking in by a thousand pinpoint stars?

I hold tight to the vision that someday soon we will find the courage of self-restraint, the humility to live like mosses.

We turn down a new logging road, past the gate and warning signs. Here there is no concealing screen between you and the land. We nearly have to turn back. I rationalize my nausea as vertigo from the precipitous roads, the cold sweat as anxiety about oncoming log trucks. But I knew it was fear and the presence of violence around every turn. And grief, grief that rises up from the stumps and soaks into our skin.

My task was to make diagnoses and write the prescriptions. Which could safely be moved to the house and which should be abandoned? I thought of the doctors consigned to meet the slave ships at the shore.

The artistry rivaled any piece we had seen in the gallery and yet it struck the wrong note; the collection was only an illusion of nature.

Commercial peat is mined from bogs that have been drained, some by nature, most by design. My garden and I are complicit in that enterprise and it troubles me. I prefer a bog wet and squishy between my toes.

As far as I know, there is no special ceremony for mosses. Maybe it’s more fitting to honor these small everyday plants in small everyday ways.

Yurok women describe a time of meditation and speak of special mountain pools where only moontime women were permitted to bathe.