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

The hero of the modern myth is the victim, the emblem of the modern self the pronoun. We seem to have forgotten that we are survivors of innumerable spasms of space and time, creatures who never would have given up the gills for lungs if we attached identity to gillness.

Not so with lichens.

When I was a child, lichen meant to me 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 your multitudes without inner conflict. Largely thanks to the groundbreaking research of Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter, we now know 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. It was through his studies of lichen that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary coined the word symbiosis in 1879.

Come to see that you can feel at home anywhere — roots are overrated. 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 — either algae or cyanobacteria, depending on the species — to photosynthesize and absorb moisture and minerals from the air, using 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. Contrary to the common misconception, they don’t parasitize the organisms on which they grow but only use them as a substrate.

Adapt to external adversities with an internal shift. When environmental conditions harshen, lichens can shut down their metabolism for extended periods, sometimes decades. This allows them to thrive in nearly every environment on Earth — from tide pools to mountaintops, from the hottest deserts to the iciest tundra. They have survived 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.

Become a pioneer of possibility amid the ruins of what was. Lichens are often the first organisms to grow on the denuded rock left in the wake of landslides and earthquakes, the only ones to keep living on the tombstones of the dead when the bodies below have long returned their atoms to the Earth.

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.

Leave the world better than you found it. Lichens enrich the soil of deserts, stabilize sand dunes, and create soil 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. Lichens, which are among the oldest living things on Earth, grow at the tectonic 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:

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 Not to Waste Your Life

By Maria Popova

How Not to Waste Your Life

“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative vitality filled these numbered days, these unrepeatable hours.

Most of us will not leave behind a revolutionary insight into the nature of the universe, but we too forget that no matter what we do leave behind — a line of DNA, a great book, a hospital wing — it is only, in poet Muriel Rukeyser’s shimmering words, in the living moment that “we touch life and all the energy of the past and future”; it is only, in poet Mario Benedetti’s shimmering words, when we cease sparing ourselves and start spending ourselves that we come truly alive.

The most prolific diarist of all the Transcendentalists, Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) takes up the question of what that means throughout his voluminous notebooks. Between story ideas (one of which became The Scarlet Letter), tender records of raising his young son, and lyrical accounts of his rambles in nature, he keeps reckoning with how to live in order not to look back with “a lament for life’s wasted sunshine.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Fatherless since the age of four, so achingly introverted he was reported to duck behind trees and rocks to avoid speaking with townspeople, described by Hermann Melville (who wrote him passionate love letters and dedicated Moby-Dick to him) as a man of “great, genial, comprehending silences,” Hawthorne felt deeply the brevity of life and the urgency of filling it with meaning — nowhere more movingly than in watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother. He understood that the haunting proximity of death is precisely why we can’t afford to live a short distance from alive; that while there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, it falls on us to make ours beautiful.

In a journal entry from his early thirties, Hawthorne writes:

All sorts of persons, and every individual, has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not.

In a sentiment Nietzsche would echo a generation later in his insistence that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Hawthorne observes that we must each make that choice for ourselves and find our own place, seeing past the values of our upbringing, the templates of our culture, and the permission slips of our epoch. To lose our “own aspect” in these imprints is for Hawthorne nothing less than “a mortal symptom of a person.” We can’t, he cautions, “use other people’s experience.” But in order to use our own, to learn from it so that our lives may broaden and deepen, we must first learn to trust ourselves, developing a “feeling within” of “what is true and what is false” without in order to have “the right perception of things.”

Because the mind is the crucible of experience and perception, there is no greater waste of life than the waste of mind. Admonishing against his era’s equivalent of scrolling a social media feed, Hawthorne writes:

The peculiar weariness and depression of spirits which is felt after a day wasted in turning over a magazine or other light miscellany, different from the state of the mind after severe study; because there has been no excitement, no difficulties to be overcome, but the spirits have evaporated insensibly.

(This is precisely why learning something is the best way to lift yourself up when the world gets you down.)

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print

A year into his thirties, not knowing he had already lived more than half his store of living, Hawthorne itemizes what it would take to have an unwasted life:

Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.

In his time, the word “genius” retained more of its original Latin connotation, meaning not only one’s creative talent or intellectual prowess but one’s essential spirit. It is the body that trembles with aliveness, but it is the spirit that animates it with life. Hawthorne never lost sight of a fundamental truth our productivity-obsessed culture is continually negating at its own expense: What fortifies the spirit to do its work in the world, be it art or activism, often appears on the surface as wasted time — the hours spent walking in a forest and watching the clouds over the city skyline and pebble-hunting on the beach, the purposeless play of the mind daydreaming and body dancing, all the while ideas and fortitudes fermenting within.

Reflecting on one such period of his life, filled with tending to his vegetable garden, reading, napping, walking with his wife, picking white lilies from the riverside and scarlet cardinal-flowers from the edge of the pond, Hawthorne writes:

My life, at this time, is more like that of a boy, externally, than it has been since I was really a boy… My business is merely to live and to enjoy; and whatever is essential to life and enjoyment will come as naturally as the dew from Heaven.

[…]

I look back upon a day spent in what the world would call idleness, and for which I can myself suggest no more appropriate epithet; and which, nevertheless, I cannot feel to have been spent amiss. True; it might be a sin and shame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in this manner; but, for a few summer-weeks, it is good to live as if the world were Heaven. And so it is, and so it shall be; although, in a little while, a flitting shadow of earthly care and toil might mingle itself with our realities.

A century later, George Orwell would embody the same truth about the spirit, growing a rose garden while dismantling totalitarianism.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Couple with Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, then revisit Hawthorne on how to look and really see.

BP

The Beginning and the End of War, in a Stunning Watercolor Reckoning with Humanity

By Maria Popova

The Beginning and the End of War, in a Stunning Watercolor Reckoning with Humanity

We bear the heavy burden of a complex consciousness that makes us creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb, apes who came down from the trees to kiss the ground with our prayers and scar it with our tranches, to discover mitochondria and mathematics, to invent love and war. Our dual capacity for creation and destruction is the price we pay for our own complexity. We live with it and die by it and make poems and paintings and psalms to transform the constant tension between the two into meaning, into something of beauty and substance that outlasts the dust of power — these are the shoreless seeds and stardust that survive us.

In a world teetering on the event horizon of its third global war, Italian artist Alessandro Sanna set out to paint to life his favorite poems from the time of the first. It all began with a single poem — a splendid addition to the small, surprising canon of stone poems for trusting time — written in the sweltering trenches of the third summer of WWI:

I AM A CREATURE
by Giuseppe Ungaretti
translated from Italian by Geoffrey Brock

Like this stone
on San Michele
this cold
this hard
this arid
this impervious
this utterly
spiritless
like this stone
is my
unseen grief

We pay down
death
by living

But as Sanna tried to paint the work of his favorite wartime poets, he found himself unable to shake off the mental images of all that ruin, the emotional atmosphere of all that grief. In the author’s note to what became Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: of Humans and War (public library) — his extraordinary wordless reckoning with humanity and war — he echoes artist Ann Hamilton’s moving manifesto “Making Not Knowing” and writes:

I could already feel my hands thinking along other lines… I have always put my faith in my hands — in their manner of working, and in how they seek to capture the best gesture with which to solve the challenge of depicting a sky, a mountain, or a wind-tossed sea. Hands think differently from our minds; hands are more daring and audacious. When hands work, they are strangely farsighted and free of preconceptions, constantly opening scenes, erasing them, starting over from scratch — as if they never work from a plan.

When his hands parted the mind’s curtain of preconception and dilated the aperture of the present, he began seeing the bigger picture stretching like a tapestry all the way back to the dawn of our species, to the birth of our lust for domination, and all the way forward to a placid universe that survives us.

In consonance with Rachel Carson’s parting insistence that humanity has reached a point where it must “prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself,” Sanna writes:

Ever since the dawn of time, the stars sparkling in the sky have looked down upon us with indifference, as we strain in the age-old, tormented contest to dominate all things that can be named. For glimpsed from that distance, the Earth is no more than a luminous, watery pearl that appears just as immutable as immovable stone.

There are echoes in these words of Auden’s timeless poem “The More Loving One,” with its “stars that do not give a damn,” with its central antidote to the human impulse for destruction and domination in the simple, immense vow: “Let the more loving one be me.”

With the feeling-tone of an epic myth and the chill of a mirror held up to reality, the story begins with a single stone that rolls down from the cloud-crowned top of a mountain into a valley where two humans, each wanting to possess it, invent the first weapon: want. The men become clans that become armies that set out to defeat each other, to conquer the elements, to own the other animals, with fists that become sticks that become bows that become guns that become the mushroom cloud.

All the while, the Sun and the Moon and the stars look on indifferent, watching us forget what Dante called the love that moves them, watching us turn this improbable world, this one and only heaven we will ever know, into a living hell.

What emerges from Sanna’s pages is a bittersweet yet hopeful meditation on the choices that stand between our predilections and our possibilities, intimating that peace is not only possible, not only our moral imperative, but our creaturely inheritance from star and stone; that perhaps we are here simply to learn how to be more loving creatures.

Couple Old as Stone, Hard as Rock with Einstein and Freud’s little-known correspondence about war and human nature, then revisit Sanna’s magnificent alternative origin story of humanity.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books

BP

What It’s Like to Meet an Orca

By Maria Popova

What It’s Like to Meet an Orca

The most profound experiences of our lives are unphotographable, untiktokable, irreducible to representation in image or gesture, for they summon the totality of our being: sensation and perception, thought and feeling, the pleasing propulsive confusion we call curiosity and the bright ablution of certainty we call wonder. Often, they are an occasion for unselfing in an encounter with the majesty and mystery of what is not ourselves — birds migrating at midnight, the magic of autumn, the grandeur of Machu Picchu; almost always, in consonance with William James’s criteria for transcendent experiences, they are ineffable. Still, we are here to tell each other what it is like to be alive and language remains the best technology we have invented for bridging the abyss between one aliveness and another.

Few encounters with the wildness and wonder of this world can be more powerful than that with an orca, and no one has painted a more moving word-portrait of that encounter than Danish biologist and whale researcher Hanne Strager.

Seventeen centuries after the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder described the largest member of the dolphin family as “an enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth” in a small passage of his thirty-seven-volume natural history encyclopedia, Carl Linnaeus named it Orcinus orca — “the demon from the underworld.” But while this striking marbled creature is nature’s most successful and creative predator, it is also the tenderest, paying the same high price of consciousness that we pay. To encounter an orca is to both to face something almost incomprehensibly other and to face the depths of ourselves. Strager channels that transcendent duality throughout The Killer Whale Journals (public library) — the riveting record of how she escaped the cage of theory that was her landlocked biology degree and Trojan-horsed her way into an expedition to Norway’s Lofoten Islands, breaking in through the cracks of the patriarchy to study Earth’s most powerful matriarchal society by volunteering to cook on a small research vessel.

She writes:

Killer whales are unconcerned with our attitudes. They don’t need our love or our hatred. How we understand and interact with a big predator like the killer whale is instead a reflection of ourselves and how we want to live with the complexity of other animals around us.

To come close to an orca is no easy endeavor, even for those who have ventured to the remotest and most undisturbed reaches of the oceanic wilderness. Strager recounts the thrill of trailing two elusive male orcas in the setting sun, the hint of their presence turning the sea into “a piece of heavy silk… gently moved by invisible hands.” But even when they vanish beneath the still surface, other senses can reveal their presence. Recounting her first experience of eavesdropping on the sea’s undersound with a hydrophone connected to an amplifier, she writes:

Through the headphones, I could clearly hear the splash and gurgling from the hydrophone as it sunk, and then the quietness of the big sea, with a low thrumming in the background, which I would later learn was the sound of boat traffic in the distance. But through the muffled noises of engines and water, I also heard the most incredible sounds, eerie and melodious at the same time. Like a tropical bird singing a mournful song or people whistling from far away across a deep valley.

[…]

Somewhere, in the vast ocean below me, in the great darkness under the leaden surface of the sea, animals were calling and responding to each other.

Understanding — which is a thing of the mind — that these majestic animals are dwelling below the surface is one thing, encountering them with the full creaturely sensorium of bodies meeting in space is something else entirely. Strager reflects on the inner transformation sparked by her first direct encounter with an orca:

A large male came up right next to the boat, so close that I could see water running down his gleaming skin. A pearly black eye just in front of the white eyepatch stared right at me. It was just a quick moment, but it stayed with me after the whale was gone. I realized that this huge killer whale had been checking us out — just as we were checking them out. To sense the awareness and curiosity of another being, and perhaps even its desire to connect, shatters an invisible barrier. It perforates the solitude of being human in a wild world where we are surrounded by creatures we don’t understand and can’t reach.

Immense and indifferent, the orcas have no sense of or concern with the myths and legends we have woven them into, the Instagram sensations and the scientists’ journals. And yet we share the kinship of curiosity, that yearning to apprehend what it is to be another — the only thing that saves us from the existential loneliness of being ourselves.

Couple with the fascinating science of what it’s like to be an owl, then revisit what orcas can teach us about love and loss.

BP

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