LICHEN

The preface to all this, the prologue that we skimmed through too quickly before flipping to a stark page full of unknown plot twists and fears, seems so far away these days. Like blowing onto glass and peering out at the world through a fuzzy haze, memories take the same blurred quality. I write this with the intent of breaking the looking glass effect, uncovering a connection with organisms beyond my 6ft bubble.

Also, because I have really taken a-likin’ to lichen, and perhaps you have too?

Growing up, lichen, like many other of the mysterious offerings a forest brings to a child’s hungry imagination, was an integral prop in our fantasies. Sprinkled with abandon over our mudpies as delicious garnish, picked and thrown by the fistful as fairy dust, stuffed into pockets to be fabricated into shoebox-dioramas in Canada’s colder months. I’m doing my best to resist the cliche temptation to stumble into “back in my day” speak, but whoops, it sounds like it’s happening anyways. Without getting overly sentimental and pessimistic about the current “shelter in place” orders’ affect on children’s (and adults’!) exploratory forest wanderings and wonderings, I want to remember how vital it is to poke around at strange “tree dandruff” whenever I stumble upon it.

That’s why I’m all the more grateful to the Canadian Museum of Nature who recently launched a contest to elect a new National Lichen! What came up in my internet moseying last month was a community of passionate (understatement!) scientists who found it a great shame (truth!) that the great white north was doing without a mascot of the lichen variety. Curious about why this particular mascot was potentially more crucial than a national…frog let’s say, I dedicated an ample amount of my social isolation spell thus far to lichen research.

It turns out that Star-Tipped Reindeer lichen (the contest’s winner), like all lichens, is a perfect model for studying symbiosis. The concept of symbiosis, a Greek-origin word meaning the process of living together, was actually created to explain the relationship of fungi and algae that was thought to produce lichen. The recent reveal in this juicy tale of monogamy is that there has been a third player in the relationship the entire time, cue the dramatic audience gasp! Another fungus, basidiomycete yeast, has been contributing to the interactive harmony of lichens all along. And this scientific development feels like just the reminder that the world could use in times of physical distance.

As a self-professed luddite, I had initially tucked my head under a rock (a trick I learned from lichen), and figured I could wait out the time it would take for the COVID19 upheaval to blow over. Alas, what a naive ostrich I was! We might be in this twilight zone of Zoom calls and popcorn-for-dinner for quite some time, and I for one am NOT going to get through it alone. I’m very lucky to be sharing my isolation with another body that I love immensely, and yet, like the algae we previously thought to be in isolation with only one fungus, the lichen teaches us that we need more! We need humans! Family, friends, coworkers, fellow Magic The Gathering enthusiasts, lovely folks to share meals and laughs and obscure 90’s commercial references with. We need furry beings! We need trees and flowers and shores who’s waves sing to us constantly. So if like me, you find yourself in need of a wake-up call to get your head out of a computer and reach out to a fellow fungus friend, then let lichen be your inspiration.

If you’re hungry for more lichen content, or just some juicy reads/listens/watches, I highly recommend:

-Future Ecologies Podcast, Episode 2.1: “Enlichenment and the Triage of Life”

-Donna Haraway’s staggering book, “Staying with the Trouble"

-Canada’s proposed National Lichen video

-National Geographic’s short film, “What’s in a Lichen?”

-Okay Kaya’s infinitely lovely song, “Symbiosis”