Soon we’ll be born among the mosses - and deliver our gifts back to the water, and maybe somewhere in between we’ll learn to live without. Extending ourselves is rooted in understanding, penetrating beyond the uniqueness of our personality into the ground of being and the coherence that us and what is around us form. Into the creative arising - a shelter of knowing that you are held by the beings around you. This is interdependence. This is safety. Our understanding of loss is limited by our stories, stories of a safety threatened. What do the mosses have to say? Listen to them. Sit with them. Each Summer as the rains cease and the sun lingers in the sky, the strength of plump bodies lessened and the ground snatched up by the air, the mosses sit patiently. Not gasping, though brittle, the mosses wait. And at the moment of moisture they accept the gift with the grace of growth. Back to the daily joys of making food and tissue. Through desiccation, through trusting in time and the stories passed down they come to know the places they live. Those places, unique boundary layers with low air flow resulting in a high level of moisture close to the ground. Existence at the boundary, niche micro-climates that glide across the surfaces of rocks and out onto the limbs of trees. Mosses find more than solace here, they find the foundation for their life and rest in the support of the others who call this place home
What of us? Where is our boundary layer?
What we have to remember, is that our very existence in the world is saturated with a transitory quality. We move in and out of the boundary layers of everything around us. We simply can walk into the space of another - a tree, a spring, a meadow. In practice, we have forgotten how to respect, and in doing so we threaten the livable spaces that nourish us. Our boundary layer is fickle and crumbly and stuffed to capacity with both delicious and painful sensations. It is everything we depend on and we must recognize that it is thinning. Thats the understanding here among the fallen rocks, lichens, and mosses, just above the water. A home of chance, a home of precocity, a layer in which survival coupled with the possibility of desiccation is presently held in the mind. A chance for collaboration, the exquisite and omnipresent possibility for creation.