Braiding Sweetgrass

Through the laws of ecological succession, the lichens have done
their work of laying the foundation for others, and now the others
have come.
I know a whole escarpment covered with rock tripe. Water
trickles down fissures in the cliff face and the trees have closed in,
making a shady paradise for mosses. The lichens colonized in an
earlier day, before the forest was thick and moist. Today they look
like an encampment of floppy canvas tents on the rock, some now
tattered, with sagging rooflines. When I scan the oldest tripe with
my hand lens I see they are crusted over with algae and other
crustose lichens like microscopic barnacles. Some have slippery
green streaks where blue-green algae have made themselves at
home. These epiphytes can impede the photosynthesis of the
lichen by blocking out the sun. A deep pillow of Hypnum moss
catches my eye, vivid against the dull lichens. I move along the
ledge to admire its plush contours. Sticking out from its base like a
ruffle around a pillow are the edges of an Umbilicaria thallus, nearly
engulfed by the moss. Its time has come to an end.
The lichen, in a single body, unites the two great pathways of life:
the so-called grazing food chain based on the building up of beings,
and the detrital food chain based on taking them apart. Producers
and decomposers, the light and the darkness, the givers and
receivers wrapped in each other’s arms, the warp and the weft of
the same blanket so closely woven that it’s impossible to discern
the giving from the taking. Some of earth’s oldest beings, lichens
are born from reciprocity. Our elders share the teachings that these
rocks, the glacial erratics, are the oldest of grandfathers, the
carriers of prophecy, and our teachers. Sometimes I go to sit
among them, the proverbial navel gazer at the belly button of the
world.