Seeking moss
Content warning: suicide ideation
Edification – Newsletter #103 – January 2, 2022
Dear Reader,
Happy New Year!
Let me begin by not telling you all about my sweeping, inspirational resolutions.
Let me instead tell you that I’m dialing the newsletter back with an arbitrary leftward twist – it’s my signature move in all things – from weekly to “occasional.”
Occasional being perhaps monthly, but possibly more frequent than that; suffice to say it will not be weekly. I will probably continue to send it Sunday mornings, so as to maintain a broken-clock predictability in the midst of dysfunction.
Okay. So that announcement’s done. Let me just check that off my list here. “Dah-dah-dah,” she whispered.
You ever meet someone who does that? “Dah-dah-dah” as a kind of verbal ellipsis? It’s like one step away from “yadda yadda yadda” but more annoying in the sense that it’s less conscious. I know a guy who does that when he’s trying to explain something. The last time we talked he “dah-dah-dah-ed” the Covid numbers. I just wanted to grab him and tell him that this life is not a Kafkaesque shade-tree mechanic’s bill. This life is not Mad-Libs for the scientifically illiterate. This life is not a to-do list of Save-the-Cat plot-points. This life is—
Anywho.
I’ve been reading about moss and lichens this week. Would you like me to rattle off a series of factoids about them for you?
The emergence of moss likely triggered the first Ice Age and a mass extinction in the Earth’s early oceans.
There are about 12,000 species of moss. (About half a million green plant species total have been categorized.)
Their common names are a real treat: Horn-tooth moss; hair-cap moss or pigeon wheat, which is adorable; extinguisher moss, perhaps because it is shaped like a candle snuffer; and elf-cap moss, also known as “humpbacked elves” or my personal favorite “bug-on-a-stick.” That’s the stuff of fairytales.
Or science fiction. London has installed a few experimental moss towers to help cut carbon emissions and clean the air. The “artificial trees” are just small blocks of different moss varieties, but each one has the “air-cleaning capacity of 275 regular trees.”
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“Okay okay okay,” I hear you saying, but I haven’t even gotten to the lichens!
Suffice to say lichens are not moss. They’re not even plants.
They’re a “composite organism” arising from algae and photosynthesizing bacteria living with fungi. They’re their own thing. They often exist in mutual relationships dependent on one another or other organisms, like moss.
Oh, and they’re everywhere. Lichens “dominate approximately 8% of the Earth's land surface.”
All right. I’m done now. Or in any case I’ll continue listening to this song replaying only in my head.
Inspiration is like a lichen, or a moss. It’s everywhere. It needs not announce its own significance. It arises from decay. It represents rebirth, an extinction of the past, and the possibilities of the future. It grows on our graves.
I think, in the new year, I will seek out the moss. Spend less time “dah-dah-dah-ing” through things (including these newsletters, dear reader).
Writing takes time to develop ideas, to refine voice, to contemplate and interrogate and check the seams. I am frustrated with the marketing frenzy around writing; while I have no desire to become the sort of anti-marketing, radical garden gnome some people might define as cool, I also do not want to be a marketer. One personal revelation I’ve made as a result of my foray into the literary world is that marketing is triggers a stress response in me.
I left marketing behind to find myself again. In confluence with everything else in my life, working in sales nearly killed me. I’m not even kidding, not even a little bit.
At one point I considered driving my car into an unguarded concrete barrier under an overpass on the interstate along my route to work.
Just make it look like an accident while my kids were at school. They wouldn’t have to know; they wouldn’t have to see. How fucked up is that?
Spoiler, though: I didn’t go through with it! I’m still here!
Instead, I pulled over on the shoulder and cried. I cried because I didn’t want to leave my children, and I didn’t want them to be the only reason I was alive. Living only for someone else is not a life I wanted to live. So I resolved to quit my job, move away from the place, and start all over again. I started doing my visual art and writing songs, and then I tiptoed modestly into writing. And it made me feel like staying alive for myself. For my own self.
And now I’m actually sitting here, not a skeleton, writing this to you on occasion of the new year. Well, I am a skeleton, but on top of these bones I’ve got muscles and a smiling face and a donut of pregnancy belly that I am trying very hard not to make a new year’s resolution about because life is too short for a mother of four to feel bad about the extra skin it took to have four children and, really and truly, people will love you just as you are. If you let them.
Please take good care, friends. Happy 2022.
Talk soon,
Edie