Moss is what returns first. Before anything else will grow, moss arrives on bare rock and ruined ground, not waiting for the conditions to be right, but slowly making them right for everything that comes after. 

Moss gathers over stone, bark and fallen trees, in liminal places and forgotten places, softening what was once hard, building the thin soil that one day the forest will need.

It begins where it is, with what there is, and almost imperceptibly it changes the character of everything it touches. Ancient walls soften. Ruins become gardens. A fallen tree becomes the beginning of a new forest. Moss nurtures the ground.

And, it’s important to remember, moss has no roots. It cannot store against hard times; it survives by staying close to what sustains it. In drought it dries to what looks like death, shrivelled, brittle, greyed, gone. Then the rain returns, and it greens again. 

It waits for conditions it could live in. Perhaps the psyche works in much the same way.

We are taught to expect healing to arrive and declare itself. Giving us a sense of before and after. But it doesn’t work that way, (or rarely).

More often healing comes like moss slowly and stealthily, reclaiming the places we once abandoned, softening the parts of us that survival hardened, returning to life the parts we had given up for dead. Asking nothing of us but that we stop scouring the ground clean every time something tender tries to grow.

Home is grown. In you. In places you have not yet thought to look.

​