Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

It’s the time when I first had an inkling that the already gorgeous world becomes even more beautiful the closer you look.

In indigenous ways of knowing, we say that a thing cannot be understood until it is known by all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit.

There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the “dialectic of moss on stone—an interface of immensity and minuteness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yang.”1 The material and the spiritual live together here.

A Cheyenne elder of my acquaintance once told me that the best way to find something is not to go looking for it.

In indigenous ways of knowing, all beings are recognized as non-human persons, and all have their own names. It is a sign of respect to call a being by its name, and a sign of disrespect to ignore it. Words and names are the ways we humans build relationship, not only with each other, but also with plants.

Mosses are small because they lack any support system to hold them upright. Large mosses occur mostly in lakes and streams, where the water can support their weight. Trees stand tall and rigid because of their vascular tissue, the network of xylem, thick-walled tubular cells that conduct water within the plant like wooden plumbing. Mosses are the most primitive of plants and lack any such vascular tissue.

Mosses inhabit surfaces: the surfaces of rocks, the bark of trees, the surface of a log, that small space where earth and atmosphere first make contact. This meeting ground between air and land is known as the boundary layer.

In indigenous ways of knowing, it is understood that each living being has a particular role to play. Every being is endowed with certain gifts, its own intelligence, its own spirit, its own story. Our stories tell us that the Creator gave these to us, as original instructions. The foundation of education is to discover that gift within us and learn to use it well.

In traditional ways of knowing, one way of learning a plant’s particular gift is to be sensitive to its comings and goings.