Yesterday a glorious accident befell me and I came across this stunning interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer . She is a member of the Potawatomi First Nation, the author of “Braiding Sweet Grass” and a distinguished professor at the Cuny University of New York in Syracuse.
The word Poikilohydric is one she taught me in this interview when she discussed the wonder of small mosses that are able to use their abundance when water is present to flourish and multiply and then disappear when resources evaporate and wait until it’s time for them to come back. She used it as a metaphor with her students about coping with the pandemic,
“Okay, I can do this for now, and when the time is right I will flourish again”.
I wish I could find a way to post the audio of the interview directly but you will just have to click on the headline to listen for yourself. It’s a stunning interview. And I can’t think of a single thing that would be better for you to hear this morning,
Why is the world so beautiful? An Indigenous botanist on the spirit of life in everything
“What would moss do?”
Robin Wall Kimmerer posed the question to her forest biology students at the State University of New York, in their final class in March 2020, before the pandemic sent everyone home.
The answer was at least as useful as anything to be found in the glut of ‘how to survive COVID’ stories that would follow over the next nine months:
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- Give more than you take;
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- Be patient when resources are scarce;
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- Find creative ways to use what you have.
“Mosses have this ability, rather than demanding a lot from the world, they’re very creative in using what they have, rather than reaching for what they don’t have,” Kimmerer told Tapestry.
“When there are limits, the mosses say, ‘Let’s be quiet for a while. Abundance, openness, water, will return. We’ll wait this out.'”
I guess mosses are the opposite of beavers. They cannot engineer anything, They cannot shape their world. But I think that must be how life is. Sometimes you are a beaver that can work hard and create your own ecosystem that provides what you need and even provides enough for others…
And sometimes you just have to be Poikilohydric and wait.
