Touch Moss

I see the phrase “touch grass” said a lot. It’s the new “get a life.” It is the speaker’s opinion that whoever they are talking to spends too much time on the internet and needs to reconnect with the real, tangible world.

But sometimes grass is not good enough. Grass may be outside the walls of buildings and beyond the borders of the screen. But grass is still well within the walls of civilization. It is too often confined to neat, tidy, trimmed, controlled spaces. Lawns are as rectilinear as computer screens. Grass is alive, but domesticated.

Moss is soft and green like grass, but it is wilder even in its softness. It is exploratory, enterprising. Moss is not content with pretty spots of ground we humans lay out just for it. Moss climbs, up trees, up walls, onto roofs. It digs into cracks. It grows alongside us, but not for our pleasure. Touch the moss, and remember that there is more to the world than what we humans have made of it.

Is it really the internet that we need to get away from to touch grass and moss? It is certainly a heightened state of artificiality. The algorithms are not meant to keep us “normal.” Normal people don’t spend enough time scrolling and looking at ads and buying products.

But that was not the first derangement. We derange each other in person too, if not as efficiently. The internet was not the first set of walls we built. The first time we were confined away from nature and bent out if its shape was when the first societies were formed¹.

Anyway, today’s book recommendation is Moss, by Klaus Modick. It’s one of those books that just floats around in my brain and comes to the surface every now and then.