The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity

By Maria Popova

When I was a child, little delighted me more than the magical green garlands draping from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the mountains of Bulgaria as a miniature Orlando. I had no idea that Usnea longissima is just one of more than 20,000 known species of lichen — almost twice as many as birds.

In the lifetime since, I have collected and photographed lichen all over the world, from the spruces lining the wild shores of Alaska to the stone walls lining the rural roads of Ireland, from Basquiat’s grave in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery to my oldest friend’s young husband’s tombstone in London’s Brompton Cemetery. And because anything you polish with attention will become a mirror, I have come to see that lichen knows many things we spend our lives learning — about adversity, about belonging, about love.

Color wheel of lichen I have encountered around the world. Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.

Here are some instructions for living gleaned from nature’s tiniest titans of tenacity:

Contain multitudes without inner conflict. Linnaeus classified lichens as plants — a notion no one questioned until Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter undertook her little-known scientific studies and made the revolutionary discovery that lichens are part algae and part fungus, with a sprinkling a bacteria — three kingdoms of life in a single organism, not warring for dominance but working together to make it one of the most resilient life-forms in nature and a keystone of many ecosystems. They are what that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary was studying when he coined the word symbiosis, which is the technology evolution invented for unselfing.

Roots are overrated — invent other structures of belonging. Lichens don’t have a root system to draw nutrients and moisture from the ground. Instead, they alchemize sunlight into sugar, using their plant part to photosynthesize and their fungal part to grow root-like rhizines that allow them to attach to nearly any surface — house walls and tree bark, dead bones and living barnacles — drawing moisture and nutrients from the air. This allows them to thrive across an astonishing range of environments — from tide pools to mountaintops, from the hottest deserts to the iciest tundra.

Cultivate healthy attachment that doesn’t syphon the energy of the other. Contrary to the common misconception, lichens do not parasitize the organisms on which they grow but only use them as a substrate and often contribute to the overall health of the ecosystem.

Become a pioneer of possibility amid the ruins of before. Lichens are often the first organisms to grow on the denuded rock left in the wake of landslides and earthquakes. They are the life that goes on living over the tombstones of the dead.

When you can’t change your situation, change your attitude. When environmental conditions harshen, lichens can shut down their metabolism for months, years, even decades. They survive in radioactive environments by entering a dormant state and releasing protective chemicals that block radiation and neutralize free radicals. They survive simulations of Martian conditions and even the black severity of outer space: When a team of Spanish scientists sent the common map lichen Rhizocarpon geographicum and the bright orange wonder Rusavskia elegans aboard a Russian spacecraft to be exposed to cosmic radiation for 15 days, the lichens returned to Earth unperturbed and resumed their reproductive cycles.

Know that you don’t need a partner to fulfill your life. Many lichens reproduce asexually — by dispersing diaspores containing a handful of cells from each of their inner kingdoms or simply by breaking off pieces of themselves to grow into new organisms.

Spores of various lichen species from An Introduction to the Study of Lichens by Henry Willey, 1887,

Leave the world better than you found it. Lichens enrich the soil of deserts, stabilize sand dunes, and create loam from stone across the long arc of their lives. They are part of how mountains become golden sand.

Have great patience with the arc of your life. Some of the oldest living things on Earth, lichens grow at the unhurried pace of less than a millimeter per year. The continent I now live on and the continent on which I was born are drifting apart more than 250 times as fast. The Moon is leaving us four hundred times faster.

Become a living poem. Lichen anchors one of the subtlest, most powerful poems ever written — Elizabeth Bishop’s ode to time and love lensed through the greying hair of the love of her life, the Brazilian architect and landscape designer Lota de Macedo Soares:

Elizabeth Bishop

THE SHAMPOO
by Elizabeth Bishop

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
— Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

BP

How to Bear Your Loneliness

By Maria Popova

How to Bear Your Loneliness

“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” the artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary. How much trust and love we wrest from life and lavish upon life is largely a matter of how well we have befriended our existential loneliness — a fundamental fact of every human existence that coexists with our delicate interconnectedness, each a parallel dimension of our lived reality, each pulsating beneath our days.

In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (public library) — her timeless field guide to transformation through difficult times — the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön explores what it takes to cultivate “a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness,” to transmute it into a different kind of “relaxing and cooling loneliness” that subverts our ordinary terror of the existential void.

Sunlit Solitude by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

She writes:

When we draw a line down the center of a page, we know who we are if we’re on the right side and who we are if we’re on the left side. But we don’t know who we are when we don’t put ourselves on either side. Then we just don’t know what to do. We just don’t know. We have no reference point, no hand to hold. At that point we can either freak out or settle in. Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what’s happening.

In Buddhism, all suffering is a form of resistance to reality, a form of attachment to desires and ideas about how the world should be. By befriending our loneliness, we begin to meet reality on its own terms and to find contentment with the as-is nature of life, complete with all of its uncertainty. Chödrön writes:

We are fundamentally alone, and there is nothing anywhere to hold on to. Moreover, this is not a problem. In fact, it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions — all our ideas about how things are — keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way… We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.

Lone Man by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

So faced, loneliness becomes a kind of mirror — one into which we must look with maximum compassion, one that beams back to us our greatest strength:

Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.

Complement with Rachel Carson on the relationship between loneliness and creativity and Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness, then revisit poet May Sarton’s splendid century-old ode to the art of being contentedly alone.

BP

Roots and the Meaning of Life

By Maria Popova

They are so far out of sight for us, creatures of the upper world, that we don’t readily think of them. But as soon as we do, as soon as we plunge the mind into the cold dark humus to which the body will one day return, they become a spell against despair and a consecration of all that is alive.

Beneath our feet, roots spread fractal and pulmonary, veining the biosphere with the bloodstream of life. The word itself shares its root with “radical” and “race” in the Latin radix — the origin point from which all things centripetally grow.

Just as I was contemplating the logical language of roots — the exposed fragments of them across the trail like a message in Morse code, a poem in Braille, a code language of fractals and Fibonacci sequences and mathematics we are yet to discover — I came upon botanist and prairie ecologist John Weaver’s marvelously illustrated century-old book The Ecological Relations of Roots.

Schematic bisect showing the root stem relations of important prairie plants: hu, Heuchera glabella; a, Astragalus arrectus; s, Sidalcea oregana; h, Helianthella douglasii; ag, Agropirum spicatum. (Available as a print and a field notebook, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

In the first year of the First World War, Weaver set out to understand how life anchors itself to the substrate of living. He spent four years studying 1,150 individual root systems of about 140 different species of shrubs, grasses, and herbs across Nebraska, Washington, and Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

Belonging to the last generation of scientists who were not yet schooled out of art and its power to magnify thought, he illustrated the book himself, drawing the root systems as he excavated them, always to exact measurements, and later retracing them in India ink.

Schematic bisect: h, Hieracium scouleri; k, Keleria cristata; b, Balsamorhiza sagittata; f, Festuca ovina ingrata; g, Geranium oviscosissimum; p, Poa sandbergit; ho, Hoorebekia racemosa; po, Potentilla blaschheana. (Available as a print and a field notebook, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Schematic bisect: s, Sieversia ciliata; w, Wyethia amoplezicaulis; ll, Lupinus leucophyllus; lo, Lupinus ornatus; p, Poa sandbergii; e, Leptotenia multifida; a, Agropyrum spicatum. (Available as a print and a field notebook, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Looking back on the discoveries, he observes:

The general characters of the root systems of a species are often as marked and distinctive as the above-ground vegetative characters. But the root systems of different species of the same genus, while often somewhat similar, may be of entirely different types.

It is not hard to see ourselves in them — how much of our essential character dwells beneath the surface of the self, how seemingly similar people may differ profoundly in their subterranean essence. It helps to remember that the visible self is fed by an invisible counterpart at least as intricate and extensive; that the two are so tightly stemmed together that we are always interacting with both the visible person and their invisible root system.

Root system relations. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

As it happens, my friend Hannah Fries has just the right poem to reverence this existential dimension of roots and their relations, found in her altogether wonderful collection Little Terrarium (public library):

EPITHALAMION
by Hannah Fries

The elm weaves the field’s late light, this hill
hanging from the tree’s roots like the moon
from its shadow and the whole
world beneath suspended.

Roots knead the earth’s thick sorrow.
Still, leaves from this.
From this unshackling, birdsong.

I am a blade of corn where you kneel,
wind and quaking stalk.
The elm’s body a vase of poured sky.

The tree will die.
Someday, the tree will die.

For now, this axis —
what we choose to compass by.

Couple with Hannah’s poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song,” then revisit a kindred meditation on lichens and the meaning of life.

BP

The Continuous Creative Act of Holding on and Letting Go: 10 Beautiful Minds on the Art of Growing Older

By Maria Popova

A great paradox of being alive in this civilization is that we have come to dread and devalue the triumph of having lived, forgetting that to grow old is not a punishment but a privilege — that of having survived the loneliness of childhood, the brash insecurity of youth, the turmoil of middle age, in order to begin the continuous creative act of holding on while letting go.

This is not easy in a culture that fetishes youth, that clothes us in an invisibility cloak as life strips us of time. We could use all the help we can get — a psychological equivalent of what Eva Perón set out to do politically with her constitutional decalogue for the dignity of growing old. Here is the best help I have encountered over the years — a kind of decalogue for the constitution of the inner country.

JANE ELLEN HARRISON

The first thing one must do in this culture is refute the romanticizing of youth, recalibrate the value metrics of the self, and no one has done it more concisely and creatively than Jane Ellen Harrison (September 9, 1850–April 15, 1928) — one of the most daring and underappreciated intellects of the past century — in her altogether superb disquisition on youth and old age:

People ask: “Would you or would you not like to be young again?” Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible. You cannot be — you that are — young again. You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no “you” except your life — lived. But apart from that, when you rise from what somebody calls “the banquet of life,” flushed with the wine of life, can you want to sit down again? When you have climbed the hill, and the view is just breaking, do you want to reclimb it? A thousand times no! Anyone who honestly wants to be young again has never lived, only imagined, only masqueraded.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

At the dawn of her sixties — that threshold moment when people, women especially, first begin to feel the cold shoulder of society, the small cruelties of daily dismissal, the subtle intimations of irrelevance — Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) took up the question of what beauty really means as one grows older, cutting through the collagen of our cultural ideology to celebrate the most beautiful thing about growing older: how it anneals personhood, chiseling away the marble of personality to reveal the sculpture of the naked soul:

For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.

[…]

There’s something about me that doesn’t change, hasn’t changed, through all the remarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my body has gone through. There is a person there who isn’t only what she looks like, and to find her and know her I have to look through, look in, look deep. Not only in space, but in time.

Also well worth reading is Le Guin’s meditation on change, menopause as rebirth, and the civilizational value of elders

BERTRAND RUSSELL

In the first year of his eighties, already a Nobel laureate who had lived through two world wars, the polymathic philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) wrote a short essay about how to grow old, anchored in this life-magnifying advice:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

HENRY MILLER

Upon turning eighty, Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) set down everything he knew about growing old and the secret to remaining young at heart, his long reflection best distilled in this one short passage:

If you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power… If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Wading into her sixties, Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) looked ahead to old age in a passage of her memoir and offered her characteristically passionate yet unsentimental advice, largely to herself, as the best advice to others tends to be:

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

JOAN DIDION

Joan Didion (December 5, 1934–December 23, 2021) was only thirty-four when, thinking about the value of keeping a notebook, she found herself shining a sidewise gleam on what may be the most important orientation we can have to ourselves as the years advance, the most important thing we can do to keep the arrow of time from becoming a deadly weapon of revisionism and regret:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

[…]

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch… keeping those lines open to ourselves.

NICK CAVE

Not long after offering a thirteen-year-old some excellent advice on how to grow up, Nick Cave, midway through his sixties, considered the two qualities cultivating which ensures that growing older is a broadening rather than a narrowing of life, a way of seeing the world with more nuance and moving through it with more tenderness:

The first is humility. Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made up of all manner of individuals, each broken in their own way, each caught up in the common human struggle and each having the capacity to do both terrible and beautiful things. If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others’ shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.

The other quality is curiosity. If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I’ve grown older I’ve learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world. Having a conversation with someone I may disagree with is, I have come to find, a great, life embracing pleasure.

KAHLIL GIBRAN

Although Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931) never lived past middle age, he was born an old soul and saw clearly the rewards of life’s later years. His excellent lyric meditation on the art of becoming yourself across the arc of life is anchored in the hard-earned self-trust that steels you against the winds of circumstance:

In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons.

Today I stand at this shore and I rise not nor do I go down.

PABLO CASALS

Shortly after his ninety-third birthday, the legendary cellist Pablo Casals (December 29, 1876–October 22, 1973) reflected on his life, locating the key to contentment in never ceasing to work with love, to live awake to wonder:

If you continue to work and to absorb the beauty in the world about you, you find that age does not necessarily mean getting old. At least, not in the ordinary sense. I feel many things more intensely than ever before, and for me life grows more fascinating.

Continuing to practice and perform, Casals approached his daily routine as a microcosm of that orientation:

I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. The music is never the same for me, never. Each day is something new, fantastic, unbelievable. That is Bach, like nature, a miracle!

GRACE PALEY

At the sunset of her sixties, Grace Paley (December 11, 1922–August 22, 2007) took up the question of “upstaging time,” ending her magnificent meditation with the parting gift of life-changing advice she herself had received from her aging father:

My father had decided to teach me how to grow old. I said O.K. My children didn’t think it was such a great idea. If I knew how, they thought, I might do so too easily. No, no, I said, it’s for later, years from now. And besides, if I get it right it might be helpful to you kids in time to come.

They said, Really?

My father wanted to begin as soon as possible.

[…]

Please sit down, he said. Be patient. The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.

That’s a metaphor, right?

Metaphor? No, no, you can do this. In the morning, do a few little exercises for the joints, not too much. Then put your hands like a cup over and under the heart. Under the breast. He said tactfully. It’s probably easier for a man. Then talk softly, don’t yell. Under your ribs, push a little. When you wake up, you must do this massage. I mean pat, stroke a little, don’t be ashamed. Very likely no one will be watching. Then you must talk to your heart.

Talk? What?

Say anything, but be respectful. Say — maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember.

BP

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)