Every creature is a book
This January finds Plant Listening in freezing Finland, sharing tracking~foraging walks at the Saari Residency, a place where writers and artists explore how art can respond to our changing environment. Winter is the best time for tracking (the snow makes it easy!) and each morning is like moving over a new page, deciphering the subtle story of the night.
It’s interesting doing these walks at a writing retreat, a place where we share stories of the human world. On a tracking walk we find other stories, those told by the bodies of animals, the rhythmic tracks like musical notes – the harmony and syncopation of worlds eliding and colliding. As Anna Tsing writes, ‘to follow an animal’s lines of interest makes you realise what a polyphonic engagement they have with the world.’
Following these animal lines of hunger and interest, invites us to move away from ordered paths and move quietly and deftly through the world. In order to read the signs and stay on the trail, we have to learn the languages of both animal bodies and the ground that holds the memory of their presence. It challenges the human mind, this language of mud, snow, and leaf. It is humbling to learn a new alphabet, and in order to see the signs we often have to get down on our knees.
Here at the Saari Residency there is a wild array of moss and lichen sprouting from rocks, cloaking boulders and hanging from trees. As I follow a deer’s tracks I see where it has stopped and eaten some and so, following an animal who is always interested in plants, I am also drawn into this ‘polyphonic engagement’ with the world. Grazing animals are the ultimate foragers, and we humans have much to learn from the simple way they eat, ruminate and give their clean waste back to the earth.
I study the moss eaten by the deer and discover it is called reindeer moss, cladonia rangiferina. In fact a lichen (a combination of fungus and alga - the fungus directing life and the alga giving it form) this so-called moss grows on stone and forms a primary food for all deer during winter wherever it grows. Most moss and lichens can be eaten, but need a certain amount of processing to eliminate their acidity (they digest rock, after all).
I spoke to Finnish chef Sami Talberg about how he processes moss and lichens, and he suggested blanching in vinegar and then soaking in a few changes of water, before drying. I did this, adding a final step of soaking the moss in honey water before dehydrating, resulting in a delicately sweet moss crunch that tastes of both ancient time and the promise of spring. Rich in carbohydrate, moss and lichen are foods that could support human life, but because of habitat loss and its very slow growth, we should be sparing in our use of cladonia rangiferina and save plenty for the deer that rely on it.
As our group stood amongst the snow yesterday morning sharing this bag of crunchy, honeyed moss, the sun shining as the delicate deer tracks melted before our eyes, I felt a sense of taking part in a story that was filled with hope. The earth asks for attention and our responsive joy is a sacred offering. To refocus our gaze on the delicate tracks of animals, the always-changing weather, and the food offered by the ground, is to move from a toughened human narrative towards a tale that is offering us another way.