Our chapter engages in speculative storytelling with local mosses in the Pyhä-Luosto National Park in northern Finland. The main character of the park is a 35-km-long fell chain, which is a remnant of mountains that were formed two billion years ago. The timberline in the fells is situated at an altitude of 320 to 400 metres above sea level. The fell tops are rocky, consisting of quartzite, composed of the sand that lay at the bottom of an ancient sea, which was left there when the ice age eroded the mountains away (Metsähallitus 2022). Yet, today the lower slopes of the fells are covered by dense evergreen forests with lush vegetation and the soft, dense and green carpet of moss (see Fig. 4.1). Further downhill the landscape turns into aapa mires; that is, to vast broad wetlands with open areas in its centre. These mires play a vital role in the ecosystem being the only breeding grounds in Europe for several rare species of bird and providing a refuge for many threatened plant species (Keränen et al. 2001). The large, open mire areas are created and governed by mosses, holding up all other forms of life at the mire—from a bear to a cranberry, as described by the Finnish novelist Anni Kytömäki (2022).

Fig. 4.1
A photograph of a thick growth of trees.

(Photo by Antti Pakkanen)

Pyhä-Luosto National Park

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Places like these in northern Finland are inevitably entangled with the contemporary tourism system that offers a different kind of ‘refuge’ for an ever-growing number of human visitors. Today, we are steered by the infrastructure, policies and entwined lifestyles to practice tourism in certain ways—in ‘ways’ that are relatively recent but form an inherent part of the Anthropocene (Gren and Huijbens 2014). For example, tourism development in the Arctic has focused on large-scale investments in airports, since catering for international tourism has been perceived as the tool for economic growth and vitality of the peripheral areas (Halpern 2008; Ren and Jóhannesson 2023). Indeed, in Northern Finland tourism development manifests today as international, resort-style economic activity steered primarily by non-local economic actors (Kulusjärvi 2019, 1). We are concerned with how the current form of organising tourism in the North leaves limited possibilities to practice tourism in ways that would recognise local tourism relations and local economic agency as sources of social change (Kulusjärvi 2019, 71).

At the same time, the contemporary economic systems based on a narrow capitalist idea of the market have existed only for a few hundreds of years, whereas we have engaged with economies—in a wider perspective—for as long as human communities have existed (e.g. Joutsenvirta et al. 2016). During recent years, tourism scholars have been voicing their critique towards the narrow focus on capitalist tourism systems and measurements of success in terms of economic growth. Tourism scholars inspired by the ideas of transformation (Pritchard et al. 2011; Ateljevic 2020), degrowth (Hall et al. 2021), social and ecological justice (Higgins-Desbiolles et al. 2022), diverse economies (Cave and Dredge 2018; Kulusjärvi 2019; Mosedale 2011; Nevala 2021), locality in tourism (Higgins-Desbiolles and Bigby 2022) and proximity (Jeuring and Díaz Soria 2017; Rantala, Kinnunen and Höckert in press) have started to question whether the development and growth of international tourism during the last 50 years or so is the only way to practice tourism. Most of all, these debates have raised the question about wellbeing in multispecies communities in the midst of ecological crisis.

In this regard, we are convinced about the importance of searching for alternative ways of thinking and doing tourism by cultivating the art of attentiveness with multispecies actors living at the margins of our everyday attention (van Dooren et al. 2016). More specifically, this chapter is driven by our curiosity in entanglements between humans and mosses as a metaphor for slow ways of living in the world (Kimmerer 2003; Gilbert 2014). There are more than 20,000 species of mosses on this planet, living without roots and absorbing water and nutrients mainly through their leaves. They feel at home in small micro-communities on the boundary layer between air and land: on the surfaces of rocks and logs or on branches of trees (Kimmerer 2003; Rikkinen 2008). Some of them, perhaps the most adventurous ones, live a more mobile life on the backs of a beetle or turtle. While mosses are generally perceived as something tiny, insignificant and slow, one of the many secrets of mosses seems to lie in their ability to take full advantage of being small and flourishing in the shade (Kimmerer 2003). Hence, what could we learn from mosses that have succeeded in surviving in nearly every ecosystem on earth longer than any other plant groups?

By focusing on the life-sustaining agencies, temporalities and relations of mosses, the chapter explores questions of marginality from their viewpoint. On one hand, our aim is to focus more closely on the lives of mosses in those margins, and on the other, to reflect how storytelling with mosses might mobilise curiosity and responsibility towards supposedly ordinary and immobile beings. We approach multispecies storytelling here both as an epistemological approach and a methodological tool that brings together existing knowledge, recognises non-human agency, offers new perspectives and cultivates sensitive approaches to otherness (Despret 2016; Höckert 2020). By moving our attention from large-scale investments to tiny-scale actors and questions of minimal ethics (Valtonen and Kinnunen 2017; Zylinska 2014), our aim is to stretch our moral imaginations beyond the human-centred ideas of wellbeing and growth.

The chapter begins by introducing the conceptual framework of multispecies storytelling and continues with a visit in the landscape of Pyhä-Luosto, where we kneel or land on our stomach to engage with the hidden secrets of moss. The last part of the chapter weaves together the storylines to discuss the potentialities of multispecies stories from the margins of our everyday perceptions and the possibilities of including multiple voices into the place-making and tourism development processes. Our aim is not to categorise or draw a well-defined picture of mosses, but rather to open various relations, continuous changes, diverse timescales and embodied experiences that may unfold when getting in touch with the non-human others. Thus, we apply relational understanding (e.g. West et al. 2021) in our story.

On Multispecies Storytelling

Reimagining ethics for the Anthropocene requires addressing the question of scale; that is, how much we could and should zoom in and zoom out when cultivating ethical imagination with multiple others (Jóhannesson 2019). While some claim that caring for the Earth requires ‘thinking big’ (Gren and Huijbens 2014; Morton 2018), others suggest that the stories of life and death need to be re-thought and re-told equally in micro-scales (Rantala et al. 2020; Valtonen et al. 2020, Zylinska 2014, 11). A great example of the latter is Joanna Zylinska’s guidebook to Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (2014), which helps us to search for a good life at the margins in times when the very notion of life is under threat.

The onto-epistemological approach of our writing builds on posthumanist and feminist new-materialist discussions that call for alternative forms of storytelling in the midst of ecological crisis (Zylinska 2014; Despret 2016; Haraway 2016). Different from traditional and classical fables with moral lessons and dualistic characters of good and evil, the purpose of this kind of ‘scientific fabulation’ is to slow down, complicate and hesitate so that multiple voices can be heard (Despret 2016; Latour 2016). This way of approaching storytelling disrupts the classic plotline of ‘beginning – problem that occurs – solving the problem – the end’ (Hiltunen 2002) and calls for leaving the doors open to the unexpected (Höckert 2020).

But what kind of expertise does it take to be conversant with mosses? How is it possible to ‘engage in elaborate forms of perception, interpreting and responding to their immediate environments and the other life forms they encounter’ (Hartigan 2018, 1)? It is clear that plants and people are not the same, but also that their lively differences are important for the coming together of connections across the complexity of the world (Boke 2019). For our great joy, Emily realises that Robin Wall Kimmerer (2003) has led the way to this type of storytelling with mosses in a book titled A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Wall Kimmerer’s stories bring together the voices of the mosses, her training as a scientist and her traditional knowledge of her Indigenous Potawatomi heritage. In her view, all these different ways of knowing are simultaneously needed as stories are about relationships. While the scientific ways of knowing rely—to a great extent—on empirical information that we gather with our bodies and interpret in our minds (Vola, Rautio and Rantala in Press), her Indigenous Potawatomi worldview also encompasses emotions and a spirit that can invite matter to walk and even dance. As Wall Kimmerer (2003, 11) beautifully describes:

Slowing down and coming close, we see patterns emerge and expand out of the tangled tapestry threads. The threads are simultaneously distinct from the whole, and part of the whole. […] Knowing the mosses enriches our knowing of the world.

Today’s ecological crisis, in Wall Kimmerer’s (2013) words, indicates a broken relationship to land that calls for re-story-action; that is, for enhancing our capability to hear and share the stories of the land. Wall Kimmerer follows the urge to tell mosses’ stories, “since their voices are little heard and we have much to learn from them” (Kimmerer 2003, vii). Her story draws our attention to the margins of our ordinary perception; that is to the complex and beautiful lives of beings that we tend to take for granted and merely pass by. She introduces mosses as ‘a vehicle for intimacy with the landscape, like a secret knowledge of the forest’ (Kimmerer 2003, vi). This is all encouraging us to ask: what can we learn from mosses about the land we live with?

Speculative Stories with Moss in Pyhä-Luosto National Park

Our storytelling with moss begins in winter, ‘when the green earth lies resting beneath a blanket of snow’ (Kimmerer 2013, 3). We travel to the field work cabin of the University of Lapland that is situated on the border of the Pyhä-Luosto National Park to commence our storytelling by engaging bodily with moss. When discussing possibilities for plant ethnographies, Boke (2019) refers to herbalists’ efforts to communicate with plants: The herbalists’ attunement towards a particular plant is based on taste, smell, vision—‘organoleptics’—and the sense of touch—haptics, that help herbalists construct personal, sensate, bodily attunements to the plant (Boke 2019, 23). We are ready to take this challenge!

Tracing Moss

We leave the cabin and walk through the blue darkness seeking a path where the snow is compact enough to carry our steps. First our feet sink in the soft snow, but then we reach the path ploughed by the maintenance personnel of the national park. This familiar path has changed completely since our last visit. Four months ago, the sky was white, and the ground was filled with many shades of green and spots of blue and red from all the berries. Now the colours have switched place; the deep dark colours have travelled to the sky and the ground and trees have become covered with pillows and mattresses of soft snow.

While December forms the high season of tourism in northern Finland, many of the non-human hosts are slowing down and resting for the forthcoming spring. They snuggle under the snow and hide there from the human visitors’ gaze. The layers of snow work both as protector for the plant communities, and as a host for human guests who arrive with skis, fatbikes and on foot.

We see a perfect spot of untouched snow and land on it on our backs. We sink into its cloudlike softness and feel a hug from mosses underneath us.

Field diary, December 20, 2022

It is clear that the snow brings a specific challenge and secrecy to our task of engaging with mosses. While it prevents us from smelling, seeing and touching moss, the snow welcomes us to leave traces to the landscape—traces that we otherwise avoid leaving. Snow enables us to develop new kinds of sensitivities with moss, since we simultaneously feel more sustainable—sustained by snow to come close to the moss without being afraid to trample it. Simultaneously, we need to practice the ‘art of attentiveness’ in a more nuanced or creative way. In our attempt to attune towards moss in winter, we seek help from two colleagues of ours, photographer Antti Pakkanen and applied visual artist Antti Stöckell. What happens when we draw our attention to now invisible mosses? The moss is all over the landscape, yet it is covered.

With Pakkanen’s photography from the park (see Fig. 4.2), the traces of ski tourism and mobility in the park draw our attention. The history of modern tourism started in northern Finland in the 1930s with the road connection to the Arctic Sea and with women pioneers hiking and skiing on the fells of Lapland. In line with this, Pyhä was among the first places in Lapland to receive tourists and to be engaged in tourism development. The first proposal for a national park in the Luosto-Pyhätunturi area was made in 1910, and the plan was carried out in the Pyhätunturi area in 1938 (Metsähallitus 2007). The old forests have lived long enough to witness the changes brought by tourism development. From the ancient fells and mosses’ perspectives, the tourists’ traces are a very recent phenomenon.

Fig. 4.2
Two photographs of trees and plants covered by snow.

(Photos by Antti Pakkanen)

Simple traces and much used traces at Pyhä-Luosto National Park

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Stöckell has also been pondering over leaving traces and being in touch with snow. According to him, one gets in touch with the essence of snow when doing winter arts. For instance, he looks for motifs from snow that has been piled on top of fallen tree trunks or on top of rocks. Here, one can saw holes in the snow (see Fig. 4.3). This technique illustrates well the different layers of snow that have accumulated during the winter and how plants hibernate under snow (Stöckell 2021a). For Stöckell (2021b), getting in touch with the essence of snow enables a connection to climate change, since the millennia-long adaptation of plants and animals to winter is put under severe test when the winter climate changes rapidly. He describes how—as extreme weather events increase—variations in winter conditions also bring variations to snow quality in midwinter. For example, after the January rainfall, he once found the surface of a frozen crust to be workable with a saw. On the other hand, an increase in the amount and density of snow in the north may also mean that melting could be delayed until May, expanding the working opportunities for an artist working with snow. This, he continues, is a contradictory experience: “I seize the opportunity with joy while I worry about the causes and consequences of the change” (Stöckell 2021b, 75).

Fig. 4.3
A photo of a forest with dense growth of trees. A fallen tree trunk has artwork done on the block of ice deposited on it.

Artwork made with snow by Antti Stöckell

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With the help from Stöckell, we are able to draw our attention to the aesthetic aspect of winter: What does winter look, feel and sound like? In the visuals of winter, the quantity and quality of light are crucial (Stöckell 2021b, 79). This takes us back to where we are now, winding through the dark landscape of Pyhä-Luosto National Park, in a dark afternoon late in December 2022. We lie down in the untouched landscape of fresh snow, where only the park maintenance personnel have left their traces. Traces that are hardly visible due to the limited amount of light reflecting from the snow. We feel safe to be in touch with the moss since our touch is mediated by the snow. At the same time, the embodied connecting with the mosses seems difficult through the snow and instead we let our imaginations reach the perhaps hibernating life underneath us. We try to bring to our minds the words of Wall Kimmerer about the possibilities of storytelling during the winter season. That is, how the landscape covered in snow and ice welcomes both speculation and the gathering of new knowledge for the forthcoming spring.

We begin to stroll towards the cabin with excitement over all the stories and studies of moss that are there waiting for us.

Touching Moss

During our walk back to the university cabin, we talk about the different kinds of guidelines and signs that are being used to enhance ethical ways of visiting non-human communities. For instance, many national parks are firmly asking the hikers not to create cairns by piling stones as moving rocks can unintendedly destroy the homes of animals, plants such as mosses and even land as such (Rantala et al. 2020). Iceland has struggled with people driving off road and causing big damage to mosses. Hence, Visit Iceland’s marketing video ‘The hardest karaoke song in the world’ chirps in the scenic landscapes, along with amusing cultural stereotypes, that one should … not traðka (trample) on the moss, it grows back so slow! Like seventy years!

The guidelines and signs seem to enhance responsible behaviour by keeping a distance and not getting in touch. Nevertheless, we wonder whether more caring relations could take place in more intimate and proximate ways as well. Like with the loved ones that we learn from without wanting to control them or know them thoroughly, but rather with live in symbiosis. In other words, how could we cultivate more caring forms of attentiveness (van Dooren et al. 2016) by engaging with—instead of merely staying away from—mosses? What kind of engagement might moss appreciate from human animals?

In the cabin, we sit down in the soft leather armchairs with warm cups of tea in our hands. Outi remembers a quote from Tove Jansson’s—author of the Moomin—Summer Book (1972), set on a rugged island in the Gulf of Finland, that you should not step on the same mosses twice, since they will not endure:

Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss. What they don’t know – and it cannot be repeated too often – is that moss is terribly frail. Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies. Eider ducks are the same way – the third time you frighten them up from their nests, they never come back. Sometime in July the moss would adorn itself with a kind of long, light grass. Tiny clusters of flowers would open at exactly the same height above the ground and sway together in the wind, like inland meadows, and the whole island would be covered with a veil dipped in heat, hardly visible and gone in a week. Nothing could give a stronger impression of untouched wilderness. (Jansson 1972/2022, 28–29)

But avoiding stepping on moss is impossible here in Pyhä—and in Finland, unless you strictly stay on the path, or out of the woods. According to plant biologist Johannes Enroth (2022), who studied mosses for 40 years, the forests of Finland are characterised by a more or less uniform moss cover on the ground surface. The green moss mat prevents soil erosion by holding rainwater that seeps slowly through the moss and makes sure that the soil temperature does not change too quickly either. He writes:

Biological nitrogen fixation from the air is essential in the ecology of forests and bogs. Mosses do not fix nitrogen, but nitrogen-fixing microbes live inside and among them. So, mosses maintain diverse communities of micro-organisms that flourish in a humid environment, which are ecologically irreplaceable. Many pathogens also thrive in dampness, which mosses keep under control with the antiseptic substances they secrete. (Enroth 2022)

Enroth comforts us by telling that it is actually impossible to kill moss by trampling. He says that the consequences of trampling are the opposite: a new shoot can grow from every detached shoot, even a leaf. Mosses reproduce by the formation of spores that are carried far afield with wind (Kimmerer 2003), which make them, interestingly, masters of asexual reproduction.

We wonder who should we believe, Jansson or Enroth? During our Google searches, we have come across images of and instructions for moss graffiti. We learn that the mosses can adapt to new homes as long as those are moist and sheltered rocks with only partial sunlight. Mosses are also described as humble co-habitants with no need for fertilisers or extra water. Nevertheless, the human hosts require quite a harsh transformation process from the mosses to be considered as art. In order to become a moss graffiti, the mosses are crumbled into a blender and mixed with beer and sugar to create a smooth, creamy consistency and then painted onto a wall. This supports Enroth’s (2022) theory that mosses can indeed survive almost anything, even blenders.

But when looking at the tourism landscape of northern Finland from the last 50 years, the impacts of growing trampling are visible especially at the tourist resorts in the form of an increased amount of infrastructure and route networks, and in the most popular national parks, where the paths are getting wider. At the same time, there are studies that show that short-term trampling does not leave a lasting impact on moss, since they grow soon back (Törn et al. 2006), and if the infrastructure is situated wisely along the hiking routes, tourists do not damage the plants too much with their trampling (Kangas et al. 2007).

But what does it mean that moss will soon grow back, if the trampling is short-term? Should we soon stop trampling—should we stop making the paths wider? If we look at this from the forest’s point of view, we most likely are exceeding the limits of short-term trampling. From the perspective of two billion years old fells, the situation looks different.

Slowing Down with Moss

We start re-reading Wall Kimmerer’s book on Gathering Moss and her descriptions of mosses as successful species by any biological measure (2003, 15). Wall Kimmerer’s book draws attention to the advantages of growing slow and being small; indeed, it is the obvious attribute of moss being small that has had tremendous consequences for the ways mosses have strived to inhabit the world (Kimmerer 2003, 14).

Reading more about the homes of mosses, at least in our case, makes one long to pay a visit. We start to make plans for the summer when the snow melts down to visit the boundary layer of the Earth’s surface where mosses lie intimately between rocks and air. It is in this layer that the small mosses enjoy their unique microenvironment with moist, warmness and calmness (Kimmerer 2003, 15–18). Talking about proximity tourism, visiting this favourable microclimate requires us to switch our position from vertical to horizontal. Laying down on a moss carpet offers a realisation of how mosses themselves create a resistance to the airflow, inviting the wind to a slow dance. While this boundary layer functions as a secure refuge for mosses, it is also a place where the two of us find much-needed calmness and revitalisation (see Marder 2016).

In Japanese culture moss has held importance for many centuries. Shirin Yoku, the Japanese practice of forest bathing, involves being in the forest and taking in all the sights, smells, textures and sounds quite similar to the task that we have taken to ourselves. But most of all, Japanese temples and moss gardens—Kokederas—are seen as places for reflection that hold feelings of refinement, humility and simplicity. The mossy surfaces are used as places to ground and reflect and are interestingly said to bring forward feelings of nostalgia and homeliness. Our emerging sensibilities and ever-growing affinities with mosses make us long after this kind of place.

Thinking of knowledge in a relational way also disrupts the possibility of storying merely with fragments of a plant as isolated beings. Instead, the lives of these mosses are inevitably entangled with rocks and boulders, forming multispecies relations and communities with ancient, slow dialogues of their own (Kimmerer 2003, 5). From this perspective too, the act of climbing on the rocks and ripping off mosses from their homes seems quite violent. It also becomes questionable why permission to make new bouldering climbing routes should be asked merely from the landowners, instead of the non-human beings whose homes are in danger (Finnish Climbing Association 2023).

Interestingly, the national parks, nature museums and nature centres tend to offer a quite different approach to mosses than the Japanese moss gardens. For instance, the webpage of the Kentucky National Park (2023) focuses quite firmly on scientific knowledge, teaching us about the difference between mosses, lichens and liverworts. It turns out that whereas mosses are little flowerless plants; lichens are actually not plants at all but form a symbiotic relationship between two different organisms, a fungus and an alga. The Canadian Museum of Nature (2023) confirms this by describing that moss is a simple plant and lichen is a fungi-algae sandwich. It is clear that we should most likely know the proper scientific names and categories of these plants if we wish to engage with them more properly. At the same time, Wall Kimmerer brings us some comfort suggesting that the names we give to our human and non-human companions reveal something important about our relationships and the knowledge we have of each other. The scientific ‘Linnean’ categories like Polytrichopsida, Bryopsida and Sphagnopsida may be suitable when aiming for objective observations of the ‘other’, while we tend to use sweet and cosy names of our closest friends and loved ones. However, we do not really have commonly used nicknames for mosses in the Finnish language, which might also prove the point about the limited interest towards them. One dialect-specific name for moss (lempisammal, soft moss) relates to the use of moss as an insulation between the logs in walls and describes the largeness and softness of the moss growth (Reinikka 1992, 96).

As new questions keep piling up, we decide to put our jackets and boots back on and take a walk to the visitor centre of the Pyhä-Luosto National Park and find out more about the mosses voice in there.

Remembering with Moss

We stomp the snow off our boots in front of the visitor centre Naava—lichen in Finnish—which welcomes us to experience nature in indoor settings. Lichens and mosses linger in the names of different products sold in the small shop. The current exhibition in Naava visitor centre in Pyhä-Luosto National Park welcomes the guests to learn about mosses and lichens through the introduction to the history of the Pyhä-Luosto fell area and its geology, nature and cultural history. Moreover, mosses are present in many different forms as aesthetic background material for other non-human beings, like a stuffed bear and an owl. The exhibition trains one’s senses to become attentive to the richness and liveliness of the non-human nature around the centre during different seasons and times of day. One can even smell the moss and breathe in its scent. When we slow down with this scent, something magical happens (Nordström 2019). In Wall Kimmerer’s (2013, 5) words, we begin to remember things we did not know we had forgotten.

We wonder whether the scents could be woven together with different kinds of written or visual stories of mosses’ worlds. Could it be done in a way that would awaken the visitors’ curiosity towards their ‘secret knowledges of the forest’ and teach our unpractised senses to receive these secrets (Kimmerer 2003, vi)? It feels like curiosity cannot be awakened merely through scientific knowledge, but there is a need to tie knots with traditional knowledge and folklore that welcomes recognising and reflecting on the agencies of mosses from different perspectives. What kinds of voices could these stories give to the local moss communities to enhance the guests’ appreciation of and affinities with these beings? (Fig. 4.4).

Fig. 4.4
A photo of a child lying down on the ground. The background depicts a thick growth of trees.

(Photo by Emily Höckert)

Mosses whispering stories of their previous encounters with dinosaurs

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Wall Kimmerer (2003, 9) shares the wisdom of Cheyenne elders that ‘the best way to find something is not to go looking for it’ but merely ‘to watch out of the corner of your eye, open to possibility, and what you seek will be revealed’. For us it sounds very similar to Emmanuel Levinas’ (1969) and Jacques Derrida’s (1999) discussions of hospitality as being prepared to be unprepared and leaving the door open to the unexpected. That is, if we are training our attention to and welcoming only certain kinds of ‘guests’, we might turn our backs on the others who are too strange and marginalised to our conscious minds and ordinary perception. Hence, the stories with the mosses can also be told as whispers that enable us to suddenly sense something that expands our experience of relations with those multispecies others; to care for those previously mundane or unseen (Halonen et al. 2022).

What Multispecies Stories Do

By engaging with multispecies storytelling with mosses, we—along with other authors of this book—have wished to problematise the human-centred idea of marginality as such. Our pondering has led to questions such as: what might mobility and growth mean from mosses’ point of view? And how can engagement with mosses help us to cultivate the art of attentiveness (van Dooren et al. 2016) to ways of being and knowing that have ended up in the margins of our everyday attention?

We suggest engagement in multispecies storytelling as a genre that can help us to recognise and bring in the voices of non-human actors to tourism planning and development processes. Instead of offering easy solutions or paralysing action, multispecies storytelling can help us to persevere with wicked problems in relation with more-than-human others. They encourage us to slow down, attune with alternative rhythms and temporalities, listen to more-than-human concerns and further mobilise inspiration, activism and hope. As Elizabeth Gilbert (2014) proposes in her story The Signature of All Things, engagement with mosses offers an alternative relation with time; that is, a relation that is different from both geological and human times. By attuning with mosses’ rhythms and ways of living, we are offered a chance to learn about slowness and smallness as some of the key features for surviving and living well on Earth.