My traditional New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day cleanup of my various cluttered email boxes has begun, and this morning I rediscovered a forgotten link to a neglected (by me) literary journal, About Place Journal, published online bi-annually by the Black Earth Institute, “a community of artist-fellows and scholar-advisers” who “use their individual and collective voices to promote an understanding of the interconnectedness of all living beings and this earth we all share”—a mission that speaks to my mind, heart, and soul.
I clicked randomly on an article—“Lichens: An Anti-apocalyptic”—in the most recent issue (October 2023, subtitled “The More-Than-Human World”) and was quickly reminded of the lichen I often spot, and sometimes photograph, on my weekday-workday midday walks. I can’t help pairing one of those photos (taken on December 1, 2023) with the following selection of the article’s sentences, written by poet-essayist-translator Lia Purpura:
"Lichens were never the subjects of still lifes. They might have been if we didn’t love such lavish measures of the end.... Since lichens were never the subject of still-lifes, we missed the chance to train our sight on the stretch of eons, the reach of eras. On lichen time. How to imagine a body crossing an epoch. What it looks like to reconstitute after decades of thirst, or to thrive in the heat of volcanic springs, on the surface of deserts, below miles of ice, inside the very body of granite. What flowering is after irradiation. How to dwell in impossible places. And though every leaf stunned red-gold in fall is enroute and in motion, we call winter a death and not a resting, no eye for endless forms in the making: leafmold becoming ground, then sustenance for trees and the tree-extendeds – the borers, aerators, spore catchers, nibblers, leachers, hydrators, all of us who, in our time, in our way, take in the bones, drink down the rain. / Our job for the moment — I mean, ever after? Repair the story of transience. / Lichens are slow lifes. No, that’s not right, let me reassemble the language — slow lives.... You might even say: a lichen are. Are systems + beings + dwelling places. Sites of exchange and regeneration, some forms breaking off and rerooting, some finding each other in air and mingling. Settling on boulders, pilings, fences, spreading on silvery slats of old barns.... The work this moment most needs? Retraining the eye that loves the end." Lia Purpura at https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/the-more-than-human-world/awe/lia-purpura
Today (as I write this, perhaps not as you read it) marks the appointed final day of the current Gregorian calendar year, and tomorrow marks the first day of another. Many are about to be engaged in “lavish measures of the end.” I, however, prefer to spend these two days in “lichen time” — crossing them slowly, quietly, continuing in process, “enroute and in motion” toward the unimagined yet inevitable end of my current form, reconstituting, thriving on the surface and below, dwelling with possibility in the midst of impossibility, resting not dead, exchanging, mingling, regenerating, repairing (and overheard telling) the story of my own transience, endlessly “in the making” even when it no longer looks like it, hoping to yet become ground and sustenance for those who come to dwell in my place when my form has broken off, rerooted elsewhere, elseways.
For the moment and ever after,
Alice