It is that day when the decorations come down. Farolitos are emptied of sand and lights, folded and stored until next Christmas season. The decorations are removed from the tree, wrapped in tissue, and the house is gone through multiple times to remove the remnants of the holidays.
There is the odd emptiness where the tree stood. The wall art and furniture was moved, we got used to the new arrangement. I pounce upon this as the moment to find a houseplant that brings more moisture to the air. My house could end up looking like a fern bar. Robert does not want the house to have all the elegance of a 1970s apartment in the Haight. We shop together.
Along the way we found this rock. It is a two person carry. The colors on my monitor do not convey the vivid chartreuse of the lichen. In contrast with the agave and prickly pear, the commanding nature of the color is more evident.
The appearance of lichen on rocks and trees has always fascinated me. Lichen takes so many forms, and is so evidently a living organism, and yet is unlike other forms of life. It seems to need so very little to survive; a hard exposed surface, a brittle old stick of wood. It is a little like moss, but is not moss. What is lichen? I did not know.
Lichen is a study in symbiosis. It is two forms of life, combined in a forever marriage. Algae that are capable of photosynthesis live inside a fungus, protected by the filaments. This is most similar to another life form I encountered in the rainforest - the intense web of mycelia that connect the trees to one another and form a living communications network. It is as if the lichen is a bridge between animate and inanimate. Our narrow definitions of life and consciousness are uniquely challenged by organisms such as these. They live both on and within the crystalline structures of the rocks. Lichens are somewhat dormant in arid climates like ours, awakening when there is snowfall or rain, and the photosynthesis of their fungal partners can revive.
The oldest identified living organisms on our plants are lichens. Some in the antarctic are thought to be 8600 years old. Some scientists try to extract their chemical secrets, in search of the "immortality gene".
Functionally, lichens are the precursor to forests. They break down the rock, over eons, turning it into dirt. As the rocks are matured by lichens in our time, tiny cavities form where seeds of conifers can become lodged, and trees then grow with their root systems clinging to the boulders where there is little soil.
Perhaps this chartreuse lichen is acarospora chlorophana, a lichen that is so slow growing this piece of rock may hold colonies that have been living thousands of years already, as it grows bare millimeters over a hundred years. We will be keeping a close eye upon it, not only to appreciate its beauty, but to watch whether it can thrive this close in to civilization with its disturbances of the air and use of water brought up from deep in the ground, from where such minerals would not usually touch the lichens.
Life is both hardy and delicate. We live in a time when we are aware of how fragile our existence as a species is, and how large a debt we carry to our planet. As we seek solutions to climate change, as we face the melting of glacial ice and the fading of species we would never have imagined could vanish before our eyes, it may help to contemplate the lichen, not because it holds secrets to longevity that can perhaps be extracted, but because it shows us survival. It shows us what it is to live thousands of years, a marriage of beings, clinging to the rocks.
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