“What if the whole point is that growth comes when we least expect it and we return to the same sacredness we are born from? The point is that while we are here, mystery asks us to set aside what disrupts our humanity and belonging for the chance to see what is good and to fix the things that have been broken by hate. As we go, let’s pray into the world we believe is possible.” —Kaitlin B. Curtice, Native – Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God

A friend left a beautiful comment on the Facebook post with these images. She said, “Interesting that you chose a moss….an ancient plant…for this quote. You’ve pictured a sporophyte or fruiting body of the moss which are plentiful at certain times of the year. You picked the reproductive body of something so small and seemingly insignificant that most never see them though they are everywhere. Your ever-widening concentric circles speak to how little actions, little changes make big impacts….even more so when many act and change when we reproduce them.”

I replied:

“Thank you so much, Susan. I love and appreciate your wise interpretation, a gift of the morning for me. If you haven’t read or listened to this essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer, you’re in for a treat. Here’s a snippet – ‘Mosses, I think, are like time made visible. They create a kind of botanical forgetting. Shoot by tiny shoot, the past is obscured in green. That’s why we have stories, so we can remember.

The mosses remember that this is not the first time the glaciers have melted. If time is a line, as western thinking presumes, we might think this is a unique moment for which we have to devise a solution that enables that line to continue. If time is a circle, as the Indigenous worldview presumes, the knowledge we need is already within the circle; we just have to remember it to find it again and let it teach us. That’s where the storytellers come in.'”