A Meditation On, Of All Things, Moss

On a rare day off this week, I took our dog for a walk down our block, a block of century-old houses on tiny lots with scraggly lawns. The sun was bright, the sky was clear and my neighbor Anita, nearing 60, was seeding her lawn.

As we chatted, I noticed moss had taken over parts of her pocket-sized front lawn. I told her how pretty it all looks. Anita, who is some kind of scientist for a pharmaceutical company, said our neighbor Ruth farther down the block, a landscape architect with grown children, told her to let the moss grow. Moss, she said, is good for the soil. I am now thinking it is good for the soul, too.


I am glad to have such thoughtful neighbors. Many consider moss a nuisance, a weed, something to be banished from their suburban lawns with products like Moss-Out, Moss-Kil, and Rid-Moss. How foolish we are; moss is the oldest plant on the planet, more than 480 million years old. Moss is so pretty.

Without moss, the life in front of us would never have evolved.

Later, I kept mulling about moss, how it has been around before people and our sin, before men dreamed up the quests of Gilgamesh and Odysseus and way before Christ shattered the dimensions of time and space to save us from ourselves.  I thought about how the Presence who summoned humanity into being summoned fragile moss first.