For over a decade, Aileen and I have been part of a group called “Interfaith Action for Healing Earth.” Together we have fomented study, discussion and action about how our faith traditions are called to participate in the healing of our earth. Let me tell you Aileen knows all the best books, because she has read ALL the books.
Most recently we’ve been reading Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who works just up I-81 at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, as a Distinguished Teaching Professor and Director at the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
Even in a group of die-hard eco-geeks, some of us were not convinced we wanted to read a whole book about moss, but we have learned time and time again that the natural world can be an amazing teacher if you take time to look closely. Even moss can teach us something about ministry, and about how to heal the world. Kimmerer assures us that a piece of moss from the forest floor the size of a muffin top hosts hundreds of thousands of living beings. If you look at it under a stereomicroscope, it is like a tiny forest teaming with life so tiny most humans don’t even know it’s there. [p. 53]
My favorite inhabitant of the moss forest is the microscopic tardigrade, also called a water bear. “Trundling along on 8 stumpy legs, the water bear bears a remarkable likeness to a tiny polar bear. Low slung, with a round head, its body translucent and pearly white.” [p. 59] The water bear relies on the microscopic moss forest, and for food and a moist environment. Now moss is great at holding water, but when drought comes moss, and the water bear, have an amazing adaptation. Both have a dormant form when water is scarce. They “shrink to about 1/8 of their size, forming barrel shaped miniatures of themselves called tuns. Metabolism slows to near zero and they can survive in this state for years. The tuns blow around in the dry winds like specks of dust, landing on new clumps of moss and dispersing farther than their short water bear legs could ever carry them.” I had seen moss as merely a lovely green fuzz, but it turns out it’s a whole world in there!
UUs affirm and promote the interconnected web of life of which we are all apart and the more I pay attention to the web, the more strands I see. There’s a certain kind of moss that only grows on the top of logs.
Kimmerer spent quite some time trying to figure out why, in some probably gross experiments that involved picking up slugs, until one day she and her grad student saw a chipmunk running across the top. After a series of experiments which involved picking up chipmunks and tracking their footprints, they were able to determine that this special kind of moss (D. Flagellare) reproduces and spreads because chipmunks love to run across logs. Whenever they stop to check for predators, little bits of moss are kicked up from the surface, creating spaces for new propagules, which they, conveniently and unknowingly carried around on their little chipmunk bellies and toes. [p. 89-90] Without knowing it, moss, chipmunks and the trees that became logs have been evolving in a profoundly interconnected way. In our individualistic consumer culture, we have been raised to believe that we are independent beings. That we can take our money and go to our grocery store, and buy our food for our dinner, and that our ability to feed ourselves is a consequence of our individual responsibility and achievement. Even the way we have studied evolution is about the survival of the individual gene.
This worldview has allowed us to extract resources and walk away from the waste, without worrying about the impact on other living beings, on the health of our own ecosystem in which we grow our food, drink our water and breathe. We hear the new UN report on climate change, and we despair. The world is in our hands, and we seem powerless to heal it. But moss gives me hope.
A few years ago the city repaired my sidewalk, and left behind a covering of fill dirt on which nothing would grow. Months went by, years went by, but the dirt that is good for laying sidewalks on is not actually good for growing things. I tried amending the soil; I tried writing to city hall. I managed to bring some life back to a small patch by my house, but the bare, sterile patches stretched all up and down our street -- more than I could ever heal. 
One spring day, I was passing that patch of ground with my now habitual despair in my heart, and noticed that moss had begun to claim the barren spots. It turns out this is one of the great gifts of moss to our ecosystem. It can grow in places where nothing else can grow. Kimmerer did an experiment on a piece of land covered with mine tailings from an abandoned mine. The company had closed and moved away, and “half-hearted” attempts at restoring the land had all failed. Like I discovered in my front yard, you can’t just stick grass seeds in any dirt; plants need a humus-rich soil to grow. Kimmerer’s experiment involved planting seeds in three places: directly in the mine tailings, in a shag carpet that mimicked some of the characteristics of moss, and in patches of moss. In the harsh unprotected land of the orphan mine, only in the moss could the seeds find a hospitable place to begin life. The super-power of moss is how it traps and holds the ingredients for life- water, nutrients, and the seedlings of wildflowers and Aspen trees- the possibility of a fresh start. Kimmerer writes “out of the carpet of living moss came a crowd of seedlings, the next step in binding up the wounds of the land, life attracting life.” [p. 50]
Our UU principles ask us to affirm and promote “the interdependent web of life of which we are all a part” and I would argue that many of the problems of our day trace back to the illusion that we are alone, that we are separate. This illusion not only leads us to ecological destruction, but shapes the way we respond to refugees, and the way we divide resources in this economy. It has made us the loneliest culture on earth because we don’t see how profoundly connected we are to one another. But life is tenacious and shockingly creative. I believe the way forward will not come from humans alone, but in what we co-create with life. Moss is just one tiny node in the web that is critical to the trees that make the logs where the moss lives and the chipmunks run need moss too. Moss absorbs incredible amounts of water keeping the forest eco-system moist.
Moss protects the larval phases of insects, and their eggs, food to the thrushes and other birds, who use moss in their nests as do chipmunks, flying squirrels and even bears. “Moss matts often serve as nurseries for infant trees” [p. 147] and the ferns that grow on trunks and branches of old growth trees. Remember those special fungus, the Mycorrhizae, who help trees communicate and share resources? “The density of mycorrhizae is significantly higher under a layer of mosses” due to the moisture of the moss, and the way nutrients like phosphorous that wash down off the trees get stuck in there. [149] Moss is the unsung hero of the forest, and forests are the lungs of the planet -our great allies in the struggle with climate change. We who worry about the fate of the our living have struggled to communicate the way humans are hurting the earth- the way our emissions are causing global warming, the way plastics in the oceans are injuring sea life. Because our western industrial culture has told us we are separate from other living beings, we haven’t seen all the ways that our footprints, like the chipmunks, are serving the spirit of life. At this moment in the history of our species, we must train ourselves to see the web in every inch of our living earth, and our rightful place in that web. Aileen, this is one of the special gifts that you bring to them ministry. You see the web of life, and you see life springing forth, even in the most unlikely places. The world desperately needs this gift right now
Look for interconnection. Interconnection is everywhere, we just have to train our eyes to see it—to see not only the individuals, but all the strands that connect them in the great web of life. One way of seeing an ordination is the conferring of privilege and honor onto an individual, as a culmination of her discernment, skill and hard work. But you are here today either because Aileen’s life has touched yours in some way, or because the UU community has touched you in some way. Even if you don’t know a soul in this room except someone who dragged you along so they wouldn’t be lonely, you are here because relationships matter. Since the moment Aileen entered this world she was part of a web of relationships, within which she co-evolved with family, classmates, congregations, trees, birds and moss. She enters the UU ministry because in some way the web of life grew her to be that. And we have unknowingly been the chipmunks and water bears who shaped and were shaped by her life.
Today as Aileen receives our blessing on her ministry, she does so within that web -- a web that binds each and every one. That web of life that will never let us go. May we bless Aileen’s ministry by paying attention to the connections that already hold us, that already bind the web of life together. Let our eyes refocus from the individual to the relationships between each and all. Like the dense mat of moss that protects the seeds of the future forest, this web of relationships is where healing and hope will sprout.
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