What the Lichen Keeps

The old woman in the village of Haabsaare told me once that lichen does not grow toward the light. It grows toward something older than light. I wrote this down in my notebook without understanding it, the way you write a word in a foreign language before you know what it means, trusting the shape of it to teach you later.

There is a stone at the edge of the bog pasture here. Not remarkable. Grey, the size of a sleeping dog, sunk to perhaps half its depth in the ground over what I estimate to be several hundred years. The lichen on its north face is orange, the colour of embers that have forgotten they were ever fire. I have passed this stone ten thousand times. I passed it yesterday and stopped.

I do not know why I stopped. That is the honest answer, and honesty is the only method I trust in these matters.

I stood beside the stone for perhaps twenty minutes. The bog was breathing in its slow way, releasing a faint smell of cold iron and old vegetation, the exhalation of something that has no lungs. The birches at the margin stood without moving. There was no wind to speak of and yet I had the clear sensation — not a vision, not a sound, simply a sensation, the way you sense the weight of a room before you enter it — that I was being attended to.

Not watched. Attended to. There is a difference that I cannot fully explain in this language or any other, but I will try. To be watched is to be an object. To be attended to is to be a question that something is carefully considering.

I am seventy-three years old. I have buried a wife and a brother and more friends than I can account for without the notebook. I have held dying animals and marked dead trees and walked bog paths in February darkness with only a torch that was running out. I am not a man who expects comfort from the landscape. The landscape here is not comfortable. It is accurate.

But standing beside that stone, in the ordinary grey light of an October morning, I understood something that I had been circling for years the way a dog circles a place before lying down. I understood that what I had been calling emptiness in myself — the quiet that came after grief, after work, after the years of naming and cataloguing and being useful — was not emptiness at all. It was a kind of cleared ground. It was what you get when you stop filling a space with noise long enough for the space itself to become perceptible.

The sacred, if that is the word, does not arrive. It was present before arrival was possible. I think this is what the lichen knows. It does not reach. It simply persists in contact with the surface of a thing, and over sufficient time the boundary between the lichen and the stone becomes a question without a clean answer.

I am not a religious man in the organised sense. The church in our village has been a storage facility for farming equipment since 1952 and nobody has missed it very badly. But I have stood in the hiis grove east of Rõuge, the old sacred grove where the trees grow in that particular silence that is different from ordinary forest silence, and I have felt there what I felt beside the stone. Not God. Not a spirit in the old village meaning. Something more like the texture of attention itself, turned outward from the world rather than inward from a sky.

After twenty minutes I walked on. I noted the time in the small notebook I carry for weather observations. I wrote nothing else because there was nothing else to write. The experience was not an event. It was more like a correction, very small, to the angle at which I had been carrying myself.

In the evening I looked at the page. The notation of time, nothing more. I thought about the old woman's words, dead these twelve years now, her voice flat and certain the way voices are when people say things they have known so long the knowing has gone all the way through them.

The lichen grows toward something older than light.

I think she meant that there are orientations available to a living thing that have nothing to do with seeking warmth or visibility or forward motion. I think she meant that persistence itself, patient and without ambition, in long contact with what is simply there — the cold stone, the bog air, the ordinary October morning — is a form of worship so old it predates the word.

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