Gathering Moss Quotes

“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 "dialect of moss on stone - an interface of immensity and minute ness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yan.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“Just as you can pick out the voice of a loved one in the tumult of a noisy room, or spot your child's smile in a sea of faces, intimate connection allows recognition in an all-too-often anonymous world. This sense of connection arises from a special kind of discrimination, a search image that comes from a long time spent looking and listening. Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“I am trying to understand what it means to own a thing, especially a wild and living being. To have exclusive rights to its fate? To dispose of it at will? To deny others it’s use? Ownership seems a uniquely human behavior, a social contract validating the desire for purposeless possession and control.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“I think it is this that it is this that draws me to the pond on a night in April, bearing witness to puhpowee. Tadpoles and spores, egg and sperm, mind and yours, mosses and peepers - we are all connected by our common understanding of the calls filling the night at the start of spring. It is the wordless voice of longing that resonates within us, the longing to continue, to participate in the sacred life of the world. ”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“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.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“But the world is still unpredictable and still we survive by the grace of chance and the strength of our choices.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“What is it that brings me here to stand like a rock in this river of sound?”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubbell space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We thing we're seeing when we've only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“But I think I cannot own a thing and love it at the same time. Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of a thing, enriching the possessor and reducing the possessed. -- Barbara Kingsolver writes, 'It's going to take the most selfless kind of love to do right by what we cherish and give it the protection to flourish outside our possessive embrace'.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“A Cheyenne elder of my acquaintance once told me that the best way to find something is not to go looking for it.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun's glare, the landscape is only a flat projection with mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories are unfolding beneath us. Blackberries ripen in the August sun, a woman packs a suitcase and hesitates at her doorway, a letter is opened and the most surprising photograph slides from between the pages. But we are moving too fast and we are too far away; all the stories escape us, except our own. When I turn away from the window, the stories recede into the two-dimensional map of green and brown below. Like a trout disappearing into the shade of an overhanging bank, leaving you staring at the flat surface of the water and wondering if you saw it at all.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“Time can vanish in exploring these places, like wandering through an art gallery of unexpected forms and colors. Sometimes, I look up from my microscope at the end of an hour, and I’m taken aback at the plainness of the ordinary world, the drab and predictable shapes.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“To destroy a wild thing for pride seems a potent act of domination.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“The combination of circumstances which allows it to exist at all are so implausible that Schistostega is rendered much more precious than gold.... It’s life, and ours, exist only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“I think you cannot own a thing and love it at the same time.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“This is the electricity of photosynthesis, turning sun into sugar, spinning straw into gold.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“I'm told that the Chinese character for catastrophe is the same as that which represents opportunity.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“Mosses are so little known by the general public that only a few have been given common names. Most are known solely by their scientific Latin names, a fact which discourages most people from attempting to identify them. But I like the scientific names, because they are as beautiful and intricate as the plants they name. Indulge yourself in the words, rhythmic and musical, rolling off your tongue: Dolicathecia striatella, Thuidium delicatulum, Barbula fallax.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“The edge of a leaf is not simply uneven; there is a glossary of specific words for the appearance of a leaf margin: dentate for large, coarse teeth, serrate for a sawblade edge, serrulate if the teeth are fine and even, ciliate for a fringe along the edge. A leaf folded by accordion pleats is plicate, complanate when flattened as if squashed between two pages of a book. Every nuance of moss architecture has a word.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“Biologists may make unsuitable dinner conversation, but we are seldom bored.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“It’s life, and ours, exist only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“Most spores can’t germinate in the leafy carpet of their own parents”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“We dont even know their names anymore. The average person knows the name of less than a dozen plants, and this includes such categories as 'Christmas Tree'. Losing their names is a step in losing respect.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“Mosses are often described by what they lack, in comparison to the more familiar higher plants. They lack flowers, fruits, and seeds and have no roots. They have no vascular system, no xylem and phloem to conduct water internally. They are the most simple of plants, and in their simplicity, elegant. With just a few rudimentary components of stem and leaf, evolution has produced some 22,000 species of moss worldwide.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“...forests exhibit remarkable resilience in the face of disaster. I'm told that the Chinese character for catastrophe is the same as that which represents the word opportunity. And the blowdown, while catastrophic, presented opportunity for many...”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“All amphibians are tethered to the pond by their evolutionary history, the most primitive vertebrates to make the transition from the aquatic life of their ancestors to life on land.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“In traditional indigenous communities, learning takes a form very different from that in the American public education system. Children learn by watching, by listening, and by experience. They are expected to learn from all members of the community, human and non. To ask a direct question is often considered rude. Knowledge cannot be taken; it must instead be given. Knowledge is bestowed by a teacher only when the student is ready to receive it. Much learning takes place by patient observation, discerning pattern and its meaning by experience. It is understood that there are many versions of truth, and that each reality may be true for each teller. It’s important to understand the perspective of each source of knowledge.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“In traditional indigenous communities, learning takes a form very different from that in the American public education system. Children learn by watching, by listening, and by experience. They are expected to learn from all members of the community, human and non. To ask a direct question is often considered rude. Knowledge”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“I am trying to understand what it means to own a thing, especially a wild and living being. To have exclusive rights to its fate? To dispose of it at will? To deny others it’s use? Ownership seems a uniquely human behavior, a social contract validating the desire for purposeless possession and control.
To destroy a wild thing for pride seems a potent act of domination. Wildness cannot be collected and still remain wild. Its nature is lost the moment it is separated from its origins. By the very act of owning, the thing becomes an object, no longer itself.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses