Camping in the Colorado Rockies we had a little disaster. One
of our small personal inflatable mattresses sprung a leak. After one night of
sleeping on the cold dank ground I had an idea. There were some large patches
of moss spread along the river bank we were following and I moved the tent over
to where part of the tent covered some moss. The others used the remaining air
pads while I slept in the corner where the moss was. I was fine. It was warm
and soft, which is odd because it was literally growing on a large flat
crumbling plate of rock. I felt a little bad afterwards because I’d flattened
the patch where I slept, but it looked like it would rebound. The decent night’s sleep
helped me stave off the ever-creeping altitude sickness and the always present
headache mitigated only by drinking ridiculous parcels of water.
That moss, growing on a sliding schist, drawing from a mineral detritus, siphoning elements, spinning them in
a symbiotic concert designed ... to keep the moss alive …
Why?
Natural selection … this moss surviving where other less
magnificently adapted mosses may have failed …
But the elements themselves, moving from scattered decay to
an orchestra of chemical symmetry in the breath of life that occurs somewhere
between the stone and the nimble rhizoid fingers leaching on its edges. It defies
entropy, it defies physics, it
uses the
decay.
Why would life fly in the face of the physical confines of this universe?
Because, obviously, as is the case with the moss ... it is designed to.
