The practice of finding joy has eluded me for a few months now. I continue to get deep satisfaction from writing poetry before work and from reading Little Gorilla to, or finding the gorilla in the ears of, my children. I have to keep my focus tight, though. I have to focus for fear this pleasure will connect, as thoughts do, to ideas, feelings and things beyond it. I can’t look out the window at the sap-split maple blossoming because potential climate wars make me want to build a higher fence between the tree and the sidewalk. Then, I wonder if the moss in the Ho Rainforest is already drying out. I research and learn that moss changes shape in response to high air pollution, which simultaneously amuses and saddens me.

Lichen from hundred-year-old Douglas firs litters the grass in our neighborhood park.  When we pass through on a walk with our dog, I take a piece of lichen with me. I think of Ho and cup my hands around this Parmelia sulcata, this symbiotic merge of algae and bacteria, and breathe in. I want to remember the sopping green. I want to remember air so thick with clean it almost had a mouthfeel. And as I feel the sadness-part of longing point over there to absence and then point out to a future of questionable green and air quality, I discover the smell’s intensity. It overwhelms me. I cannot actually escape the sopping green of it. It is here right now. In Ho, I thought the smell was the trees, the old growth Sitka Spruce and Western Hemlock, and maybe the hip-tall ferns or verdant moss filtering, cleansing and reinventing the air into aura. But as I fill my palms with my warm breath, I discover it was the lichen all along. I breathe out and the lichen breathes back the forest. I breathe out and then breathe in quickly to catch another lichen breath, an absolute potent green from the small cup of my hands.

Image credit: Illustration of the moss Bryum Glaucum, from Plantarum indigenarum et exoticarum icones (1788)

Lesser-known bat stats:

1. “Bats can detect something as fine as a human hair as much as a mile away”–from the Warrior’s Path Naturalist Activity Handbook, via my sister.
2. Bats can tell one person from another by our breathing sounds.
3. Female bats practice birth control.
4. Most bats have only one pup a year.
5. Bats can swim.
6. Guano was Texas’s largest mineral export before oil.
7. Bats are important pollinators.
8. Bats make up 1/4 of the world’s mammals.
9. Bats and humans were once one and the same.
10. Bat #15 looks a little like Hugh Jackman.

Image credit: Illustration from Ernst Haeckl's Kunstformen der Natur, 1904,the Public Domain Review.