This year we are celebrating the publication of a new book by distinguished author Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist, mother, plant ecologist, and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Kimmerer is already honored for her beloved, best-selling, Braiding Sweetgrass. Now, I’m excited to say that this Fall she has given us The Serviceberry, “A bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.” Already, many sources, including The New York Times, have named it a Best Book of the Fall.

I look forward to writing more about The Seviceberry later. For now though, just let me emphasize that any of Kimmerer’s books would make a splendid gift for all who care about nature. With its different viewpoints on nature, economy and gratitude, it also would be an inspiring selection for book club discussion.

Today, though, I want to introduce you to her lesser known first offering, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, because this too is a wonderful book, and by wonderful, I mean dense with wonder. We urgently need this view of the world.

Really, the whole of Gathering Moss, a winner of the John Burrough Medal Award for Natural History writing, is filled with exciting quotations.

“I’ve found mosses to be a vehicle for intimacy with the landscape, like a secret knowledge of the forest. This book is an invitation into that landscape.”

“All it takes, Kimmerer says, is attention and knowing how to look.”

Partly, the moss book is about seeing plants as teachers, but it is far more than that.

“Understanding mosses become(s) a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world”

“The way I was taught plant science pushed my traditional knowledge of plants to the margins. Writing this book has been a process of reclaiming and giving its rightful place to the indigenous ways of knowing. In traditional indigenous education “It is understood that there are many versions of truth, and that each reality may be true for each teller. … Every way of knowing has its own strengths and weaknesses” 

WISDOMS FROM THE BOOK

JUST LISTEN!

“The air smells rich with the breath of mosses,” she writes.

“Competition in a family decreases everyone’s potential success. So evolution favors specialization, avoiding competition, and thus increasing the survival of the species.”

But also: “seeds grew and survived best while living in partnership with the moss, …life attracts life.”

“Mosses have a covenant with change; their destiny is linked to the vagaries of rain. They shrink and shrivel while carefully laying the groundwork of their own renewal. They give me faith.”

Gathering Moss goes far deeper than the story of mosses. Interspersed with anecdotes about the changing world of moss are poignant passages about facing change in her woman’s life–birth of a daughter, mothering and letting go. “I too can have a covenant with change, a pledge to let go, laying aside resistance for the promise of becoming.”

She speaks of individual species of moss and their diversity with affection and familiarity. “I know of no moss more charged with well-being than Teraphis. … It turns out that the story of teraphis is more exciting than I could have imagined”

There is a delicious chapter on miniaturism. “The water-filled pocket in a moss leaf can support unique species of rotifers, invertebrates that know no other home but the tiny pool among the moss leaves.” Talk about my pleasure in the rich minutiae of life contained in vernal pools.

“There is no pattern without a meaning”, she insists. “To find it, I needed to try and see like a moss and not like a human.” To me, this alone is important to remember.

Gathering Moss is charming, accessible and thought-provoking. Take for instance her quote from EO Wilson “Mysterious and little-known organisms live within reach of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.”

WHY YOU SHOULD BE INTERESTED

“Mosses have an exceptional capacity for removing toxins from water, binding them to cell walls. In fact, mosses and lichens are sensitive to air pollution—biological monitors of contamination. (Soon after our local dump was closed down masses of both mosses and lichens returned to my own area).

Through her study of mosses Kimmerer says she “regained my childhood relationship with the woods, one of participation, reciprocity, and thanksgiving,”

“Mosses have an intense bond to their places that few contemporary humans can understand. They mut be born in a place to flourish there. Their lives are supported by the influences of previous generations of lichens and mosses…”

In the end, Gathering Moss is an irresistible invitation to travel within this broader way of understanding which Kimmerer so beautifully offers.

I can’t leave without quoting her credo, one which shines in all her writing and one which is mine as well:

I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.