moss

Yes, I know it's usually lichen ... but here's some moss.  I'm following my own maxim of looking carefully at what I take for granted - or rather, what I don't even notice.  The moss in Hillside has been a particularly bright spongey green this week, especially today, after lots of rain.  I think it would be hard to overlook.  But if I hadn't read Robin Kimmerer's Gathering Moss, I don't know that I'd have been so alert to the sporangia and seta - the spore-bearing stalks - sticking out from the surface.  And I'll add what Kimmerer said in an interview with Guardian last year: she was talking specifically in relation to pandemic times, but I'll take it as a general principle, right now: “This is a time to take a lesson from mosses ... of being small, of giving more than you take, of working with natural law, sticking together. All the ways that they live I just feel are really poignant teachings for us right now.”  (Guardian 23 May 2020).