We need to talk about moss

Green eyes, green heart, holding on.

Something has happened to the moss here. Perhaps it is the time of year. The moss seems greener than it should do. It is bright green. It is neon, alien slime green. It is, all of a sudden, glowing and covering places that I didn’t think it did, like between the woven plastic of my doormat and the stretch of pavement outside my front door. Great matted landscapes have formed in places I don’t remember seeing them before. The green meets me as I open the door and like a pillowy, pin-cushiony trail leads me out into the street. 

But then, perhaps nothing has happened to the moss at all. Perhaps, instead something has happened to me. Perhaps it is that time of year too. 

I have been extra still lately. Unwellness has covered over more of me. It has been a creeping, smothering sort of feeling, a growing sense of weight, of heaviness, like gravity has changed or I’m filling, slowly, with water. I get tired just sitting up. I have noticed that everything has got harder again, that I’m having to wade through the moments in a way that I haven’t had to in a while. The days are a thick, tarry pool. I struggle to think. For a few hours it sometimes lifts, like morning fog, but soon enough there is that slipping, slipping, slipping, and down down I go again. It’s fine. Forty years of ME/CFS. Nothing new.

In bed, I think about the moss outside. I picture the carpet of green. The moss has become my eyes. I expect to look in the mirror and see them changed, green like emeralds. When I can, I open the door, I follow the moss. I move, quiet and heavy like the rain. 

The moss grows best where things have worn or broken. It grows in cracks, in places left unguarded. It grows where there is a gap; an opportunity. Our neighbourhood is not well cared for. The pavement here has been worn away by age, neglect and weather leaving hollows and holes so the moss spreads in great mats. It grows along the ground, filling each line between the paving stones, and it grows up, up, bulging between bricks, filling gaps between fading paintwork, creating soft furry finials on fence posts and walls. I half expect to see my distracted, trodden-down neighbours sporting patches of it on their elbows and knees and their tired, hard faces. And me – how can it not have grown on me yet? 

Starting at my doormat, I can, with my eyes of green, follow the trail from place to place. I touch my fingers to it, bending down and moving closer until each patch becomes a miniature forest, until I get tired and have to go back to bed again. Whether I manage five steps or a hundred, I can find vast worlds, swirling green maps to pore over. I do this over and over. I find it is, just now, the only thing I want to look at, my only real reason to go outside, the only thing worth the post-exertion collapse.

Over a couple of weeks, I have turned my camera roll green too. “Look,” I text my lover. “Look at it.” I print out the pictures. I watch videos narrated by earnest, bearded Bryologists. I paint my fingernails green and tell everyone it’s for Halloween. One day, a day of deep frustration, my body a shaking, useless thing dissolving fast in the day, I rummage under my bed in desperation and pull out an old velvet skirt. Sinking back into the pillow again, I begin to cut it up and thread my needle. If I can’t see moss, I will make some. I have stopped apologising for loving the things I love so deeply or feeling guilty for letting it steer my hands, my thoughts. If I can’t be well, I can do this: I can let love take me over.

The more I read and learn, the more I love. Mosses can resist extreme change, extreme temperatures, deprivation, loss. They suck up toxicity and aren’t made sick by it. They can go decades without water. When life is not going their way, they fall into a kind of suspended animation, sleep-like, but as soon as it rains again, they revive and continue their slow and unstoppable growth. The moss around me was always here. It’s just extra full of life right now. It’s having its moment. I think: I’m glad I noticed. I rejoice in it like a friend with good news.

Mosses don’t have roots, they just hold on, wherever they are. They pull their nutrients from the air and use their thick, green bodies to benefit and protect the things around them. In the First World War, they were packed into wounds and they healed them. They didn’t complain. They didn’t recoil from sickness, from death. When it comes to their time to stretch and to spread, they throw up sporophytes that look like little periscopes and fill them full of curious spores ready to catch a wind and a chance. They are soft and cushiony and comforting, velvety like a bed, like an old out-of-fashion skirt, like the hide of an animal that wants to curl its body next to you within reach of your fingers. They are burnt and killed by people who value tidiness and control over wildness and balance. They are overlooked, ignored, dismissed.

Mosses were some of the first plants on earth and they grow on my fricking doormat.

Green. Green. Some weeks I can be so green, so FULL, like I've soaked up the whole world. Other days come, like these, and I am as dry and dead as bone, barely able to lift myself from the pillow, but moss is my new teacher. I may be something quiet and and dormant, but I am still softly, tenaciously rooted to my bed, to the earth, to this patched-up, broken neighbourhood. Nothing is lost. I write these words on my phone in gentle shakings of self and activity and then I drop to the ground again. I am still here. I wait for my turn. 

I choose faith over hope these days. No one can tell you what your faith should look like. Mine looks like a lush green velvety carpet where there really shouldn't be one.

In between sleep, I stitch tiny french knots of devotion, of thanks. I should try to finish this more quickly, I think, despite myself. Outside my door, the moss laughs at me as I miss its whole point, and I smile sheepishly. Okay, okay, no rush. No rush at all. 

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