The practice of lichen.
They're just sitting there. And they're really patient about it.
Lichen is crusted across the stone. Grainy white edges going darker grey, splashes of rust and dapples of black stone where the map of growth—a coastline of lichen bordering the sea of rock—breaks up into smaller and smaller islands and then more islands of different lichens, dotted whites and washed-out blacks. Struck piano notes of mottled, fading greens.
The stone and its community of lichen is warm to my touch, the intermittent sunlight shifting the color of the flattened filaments as the algae partner of the fungus-algae commune sucks up sunlight for photsynthesis.
I’m on my hands and knees in stiff wild grass, beside a bent and rusted wire-and-wood-post fence, halfway up the north side of a deep Irish valley.
This morning, as we made our way cross-country, wildly changeable skies of thick clouds gave way every few minutes to warming Irish high-summer sunshine swept across the steep sides of valleys, and the steel lake water of the long—and very deep—Lough Mask. We’ve taken the road edging between counties Mayo and Galway, following the fractal coast of Lough Mask heading for the high pass and a hike above Lough na Fooey (Irish: Loch na Fuaiche).
na Fuiche is a 2.5 mile long, half-mile wide rectangle of black water at the base of one of those steep valleys, defined to the north by the Partry Mountains in Mayo, and to the south, by the mountains of Galway. It’s fed by dozens of streams threading darkly out of the mountains, and the river Fooey (Irish: Abhainn na Fuaiche) at the lake’s western shore. na Fuiche’s source is the brilliantly named, 2,116 foot-high Devilsmother mountain. In Irish, the Devilsmother has two names: Magairli an Deamhain — ‘the Demon’s Testicle,’ and Binn Gharbh — more prosaically, ‘Rough Peak.’
It’s a deeply quiet afternoon. Wind shakes the grass gently. We’ve scrambled up the steep slope from the road, and stopped here, halfway up the ridge. Sunlight rakes the rock and grass flowing down the hill to the road, and beyond it as the valley flattens out, to the lake.
490 million years ago — deep geologic time — this valley was the site of a volcano. The landform of the caldera is long worn away, but some very, very ancient rubble and pillow lava are still around. Like any respectable Celtic body of water (think Loch Ness), there’s stories of sea creatures. At na Fuiche, it’s An Capaill Uisce—the Water Horse. Like a nocturnal Kelpie but much nastier, with a black hide that reflects moonlight like slick rock.
Lichen are even older than the volcano, measuring Deep Time in the billions of years, by fossil record. They are incredibly tough, extremely slow-growing, and long-lived, actually a mutualistic organism made up of a community of fungi and algae, or a cyanobacteria.
The grey and orange islands of crustose lichen here above na Fuiche are some of the slowest-growing, its practice to advance as slowly as a half-millimeter a year, and could easily be a thousand years old, or older. They are an extremely patient organism—a community measuring life in millimeters, centuries, millennia. Silently clinging to the face of this rock, absorbing sunlight and moisture as they wash across the ridge line. The lichen gradually expanding across the surface, and slowly reaching microscopically into the rock, through a rough skin to my touch completely impermeable, but to lichen, porous.
Like any organism, there’s a strict mathematics governing its seemingly chaotic growth — a fractal geometry. The more closely you look, the more complex it’s unfolding. Gazing into infinity.
The quiet, steady growth — lichen’s deeply patient practice — is its enduring strength. Lichen’s adaptability to extremes of hot and cold, coarse and challenging climates: deserts, high mountains — this harshly exposed, precarious ridge of jumbled, volcanic rock — are what defines the organism. A pale archipelago of fungi and algae, grown across this larger archipelago of strewn boulders. The torn valley and black lake looked after by An Capaill Uisce — that ancient ghost-dragon, that dead volcano. A meditative, deep rhythm.
In this dappled lichen’s slow-growing and ancient geometry there are live volcanoes and vast inland seas: an earth without an imposed sense of time or purpose — just being. Nautilus shells inside nautilus shells, clinging to the seabed of rock, a geometric spiral of patient endurance. Sunlight converted to energy, tendrils probing microscopically over hundreds, and thousands, of years, across, and into, scaffolding rock.
Just sitting. Quietly, determinedly, without fuss. No big deal: just here
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One more thing.
As a zen priest I’m a student of Tenshin Fletcher Roshi at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center. For more info on Yokoji, please visit www.zmc.org.
I’m also the caretaker of Warwick Zendo, a small in-person and online sangha based in the lower Hudson Valley of New York. if you’d like to check out our practice community, we’re at www.warwickzen.org.
How this works.
I plan to post at least once a week, at minimum. The Freeside will offer those weekly posts, which will always be accessible. Payside will (eventually) offer access to some longer writing and ongoing investigations into practices both literary and zen.
Payside also helps to sustain this project, and this practice. Like any creative project, keep sweeping is a kind of labor, and as such, your support to sustain that labor is much appreciated.
If Payside is not for you, that’s all good. The posts will keep coming on Freeside. The support of your reading and attention is a deeply appreciated gift, and I thank you for being here.
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