Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

In the collection’s preface, Kimmerer explains that “Long before [she] went to university […she] regarded plants as [her] teachers” (vii). One of her primary purposes in writing Gathering Moss is to share some of the lessons mosses have taught her and to demonstrate this educational process in action. She uses this collection of essays to argue that by developing an intimate relationship with the natural world and patiently observing it, people can learn valuable lessons about themselves.

She first illustrates the kind of patient, intimate relationship she is talking about in early essays like “The Standing Stones,” “Learning to See,” and “Kickapoo.” In “The Standing Stones,” she portrays her own intimacy with the land of the Cranberry Lake Biological Station. She depicts herself walking, barefoot, across the land that she knows so well that, even in the dark, she knows where each root and each rock is located. In “Learning to See,” she explains the value of many hours of patient observation of nature: it trains the neural pathways to recognize patterns, until “The unseen is suddenly plain” (9). In this essay, Kimmerer describes the beauty of specific mosses, offering vivid images that convey the intricate textures and forms she has observed and demonstrating her intimate knowledge of them.