Nature's Quilt of Life, Loss, and Renewal

An encyclopedia beneath our feet

I’m outdoors again for my voiceover this week; swaddled in multiple layers from head to toe after a second very cold night…

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Greetings from the moss; Happy Thanksgiving if you are over in the USA.

I’m a little behind this week, wondering what to write about, knowing I could share more snowy pictures. And then first thing on Tuesday morning I pick up a favourite book that is rarely out of reach, read a random part, and the words come.

Before the snow melted, curiosity drew me away from the policy¹ trees back to the moss. I found its usual busyness newly minimal, as if Kondo-ed².

So deceptive.

Its complexity fascinates me. There is the visual, but also the concept.

The accretion of organics:

Deposition
Sedimentation
Lithification

This tapestry weave, threads pulled through canvas at opposing angles, building layer by layer, is a living stone. A sister to sandstone and shale. Like limestone it contains a hidden record of lives, processes, opportunities gained and lost.

An encyclopaedia, a dictionary, for which I seek a glossary.

There are poems and spells here. Whispers and echoes; psalms and prayers. Fossils far removed from the light, from oxygen, an ancient history half preserved in dark soup; acidic, brooding.

The living and the dead. I wonder what, who, the moss holds in its watery embrace; in limbo, neither whole nor surrendered to the fullness of decay. Decomposition, uncoupled. A composition. Notes of long forgotten melodies.

It is also a sponge. It has been an unusually wet year, yet often the water that falls from the sky has quickly become a ghost. I have had to be patient, and wait two months longer for a sudden filling of those old mossy ditches, ephemeral and emerald. This too has been a gift of the early snow, its fingers extending down from the hills to the valley, feeling, feeding the moss; an umbilical cord that binds the two, land and water.

Yesterday (Monday) they brimmed and spilled, the pools once again conjoined, the water wriggling a little in the Autumn sunlight. While the land carried the messiness of snow gone here was a new version, fragments of world remade in Technicolor.

For sure, there was detritus too: twigs and leaves, the flush of birch seed that snow and storms always seem to bring. Look closely, curiously, and there is beauty too. And as I look in the water, I too become reflective.

Twelve months ago this moment, this thought, began my intimacy with the moss.

Wet leaves, bleached pale, drape softly in fluid disarray. Asphodel has lost its sharp colours, yellow and green, but stems and seed heads still puncture the air. There is a strange but beguiling beauty to be found in decay.

One year on, I’m still getting to know the moss. And this week she has her own encore.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this letter and it sparks something for you, please share it with someone you know who might enjoy it. If my writing is new to you and you’d like to catch up with recent posts you’ll find them on my home page.

Thank you for being here. Until next week, when I will have had chance to review the icy images (and thaw myself out) and share these with you,

Encore:

A favourite read from the last 7 days:

This sublime piece by

rebecca hooper

, from which I could pull so many luscious lines, shows that non-fiction writing can match fiction for pace and plot. It is also a delight in the way that it shows the wildfire of excitement spreading through humans who open themselves up to nature.

the wild has no clean lines

All words and images are copyright © Michela Griffith except where otherwise noted

1. the enclosed ornamental grounds in which a large country house is situated, the park of an estate, pleasure ground https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/policy

2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/kondo-ing-a-guru-of-organizing-becomes-a-verb-11547745648