Thresholds shape how life emerges and endures.
In ecosystems, thresholds are places of negotiation—zones where organisms adapt in real time to shifting conditions, often with limited resources. Moss lives here. It persists through an ancient, embodied capacity to dwell in the unstable.
Among the oldest land plants, mosses diverge from more dominant flora. They have no roots, no vascular systems, no flowers or seeds. They draw nourishment through direct contact, surviving by proximity, slowness, and mutual holding. Moss doesn’t avoid the edge—it specializes in it.
In human systems, liminality is often pathologized or ignored altogether. People in transition—between homes, roles, identities, or clarity—are expected to move through quickly. We’re rarely supported to stay. We’re trained to fix, to flee, to “bounce back.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose work helps us remember how to listen to the land, calls mosses the “most overlooked of teachers.” In Gathering Moss, she writes that moss “lives on the edge of possibility.” These organisms flourish in precariousness—not through force or speed, but by embracing the long rhythms of becoming.
Moss moves with intention. It clings without clutching. It forms dense, layered mats that retain moisture and offer protection. Without a central root system, its strength is collective and distributed. When conditions shift, moss doesn’t escalate—it pauses, adjusts, waits. Its wisdom is relational.
In movement work, advocacy, and care labor, we cross thresholds constantly. Laws shift. Funding disappears. Safety is redefined. We are often asked to respond before we are resourced. Thresholds are disorienting. But they are also where change takes shape.
Moss teaches a different posture in these moments—one rooted in presence, not panic. Advocacy shaped by moss might prioritize depth over acceleration, connection over consolidation, sustenance over spectacle. Its progress is less about visibility, more about cohesion. The work binds. It holds. It endures.
Moss creates its own microclimate. It softens the surfaces it touches. Even when dried or trampled, it retains a memory of moisture and reanimates when conditions allow. This is not fragility—it’s refined resilience.
For those navigating change—across institutions, identities, relationships—the mosses offer a kind of kinship. They do not flatter with ease or inspiration. They model sustainability born of attentiveness, entanglement, and time. Slowness becomes strategy. Interdependence becomes strength.
In a moss forest, nothing stands alone. Each thread adds to the resilience of the whole. Restoration becomes possible not through force, but through returning—when water comes, when warmth returns, when someone makes contact.
Those holding thresholds—within bodies, communities, institutions—carry the task of tending what is still forming. The future doesn’t arrive fully grown. It needs holding. And in that act of holding, we take part in the same offering that moss extends: presence as a form of care, endurance as collective memory.
Kimmerer writes that mosses make love without urgency. They persist without spectacle. They root memory in the smallest fragments of earth. That kind of living carries a different kind of power. A quiet guidance.
Dwelling in the in-between—uncertain, tired, without clear footing—reveals a place alive with possibility. This space resists resolution. It asks to be witnessed as process, not pause.
Edge-dwellers are everywhere. Some of them ancient and green, listening from the stones.
For further reading: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State University Press, 2003).
Threads of Counsel 