This is a fruticose lichen, maybe Usnea subscabrosa, what my book calls “Bark Scratch.” This one lives in the Bent Creek Experimental Forest. It sticks itself to a tree with a holdfast, and the shrubby business is the thallus. Cozy inside a bunch of fungal hyphae is a layer of algal cells, photosynthesizing their hearts out. Mycobiont and photobiont are living a held-fast, well-fed life, all and only because of each other. The feeling is: mutual!
I long for that for us. It helps me to have a vision to practice towards, and one I hold dear is the Combahee River Collective and their 1977 Statement. This document is foundational to so much of what’s been envisioned since. If you find the Statement meaningful, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s book “How We Get Free” is a set of interviews with members of the Collective and with contemporary Black organizers, including Alicia Garza. I really loved it.
This week I practiced with my friend Janine. She runs a school in DC and asked me to look into the history of words her community has centered, like dream and power and oppression. So I turned the pages of my very old dictionary, with love for Janine as a layer within me, looking at the words through eyes that weren’t only mine. And then in conversation, we changed and claimed those words together in ways we couldn’t do alone. We were helped along by our long friendship, and our early recognition that we were each other’s people. This is something I am learning to do: see that quickly and not mess around once I can tell. Hold, fast.
How about you? You can reply to send me an email, or leave a comment, or text your friends, about your favorite sentence in the CRC Statement, or what you are practicing, or what is helping you along. Who or what are you feeding, or being fed by? Who or what are you making a place for, or is making one for you?
If you missed last week, about a speckled shield lichen and the BREATHE Act, it awaits you. If you ended up here because of someone who loves you and you’d like some context, here’s some.
influences and references: Combahee River Collective Statement, How We Get Free, Field Guide to the Lichens of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, US Forest Service on lichens, my very old dictionary + my years of blogging about it
Ahhhhh "How We Get Free" and lots of other books we need are 40% off at Haymarket right now for Black History Month <3 https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/65-40-off-haymarket-books-on-the-struggle-for-black-liberation