12th January 2026
Better weather today, though no brighter — heavy cloud resting across the landscape like a winter-weight duvet, pressing down on everything. Inertia felt like the next best thing to sleep.
But Neil and I couldn’t rest. We had uneasy news to carry forward.
His bypass surgery pre-op and admission date came through — the end of the month. Of course, the inevitable has been waiting on the horizon for a long while now. But suddenly it felt closer. Not looming — advancing. Lumbering toward us like a monster.
So we chose not to outpace it, exactly. More a gentle diversion than an evasion. After all, bypass surgery is life-saving. But courage, I am learning, still needs air.
We took to the forest path.
I was thinking of yesterday — of moss and lichen clinging to rocks in our re-wilded habitat like tiny principalities, green continents no bigger than my palm. Parallel realms. Quiet sovereignties. We know British Soldier Lichen grows in these woods, and I half-hoped, half-expected to meet them again.
My eyes were troubling me — a nasty subconjunctival bleed in my most vulnerable eye, sore and scratchy, perhaps stirred by stress. Blinking both eyes hard shut, I paused. When I opened them again, I realised I was standing beside a steep bank where pale, mint-soft shapes were climbing the soil like miniature towers. Without quite knowing why, I lifted my hand and gently hovered it over them.
And Neil said, Look.
There they were.
Not everywhere. Just here. This one place, along three or four miles of deep conifer forest.
British Soldier Lichen.
Their proper name belongs to the genus Cladonia, a family of lichens made not of one being, but two: a fungus and an alga living as one. Not competition, but collaboration. The fungus builds the structure; the alga gathers the light. Together they make a life where neither could alone.
Those red tips — the famous “berets” — are not flowers at all, but fruiting bodies: apothecia, where spores are made. Lichen grows slowly. Some species take decades to form colonies the size of a hand. They are ancient negotiators of time, these small beings. Patient. Unhurried. Choosing carefully where they settle.
They like clean air. Poor soil. Stillness.
They do not thrive where the world is too busy.
Their name troubles me a little. “British Soldier” — a colonial echo, a reminder of history’s heavier boots. And yet, standing there today, I felt light-footed, my burden somehow lifted. I found myself quietly grateful for them. Not as symbols of conquest, but of courage. Tiny red-capped witnesses, insisting on colour where everything else was muted.
We needed that.
Folklore has always grown wherever people meet uncertainty. Weather lore, plant lore, stone lore. We name what we cannot command. We give stories to what steadies us. In old traditions, moss was said to grow on the north side of trees because it knew where the sun would not scorch it. Lichen was believed to be a bridge between worlds — not plant, not fungus, not either, not both. A being that refused to fit.
Today, I understood that a little better.
By the time we turned back, the forest had done what it so often does. It did not remove the fear. It did not tidy it away. It simply held us alongside it.
Nature does this quietly.
It does not solve.
It accompanies.
We walked home lighter, braver. Not because the future had changed — but because we had been reminded how many ways there are to live well inside uncertainty.
Strength, it seems, does not always burn hot like the proverbial home fire.
Sometimes it glows red on the tip of a lichen.
Sometimes it waits where your senses pause.
Sometimes it says, Look.
And sometimes, the most important thing we can do for each other — human and more-than-human alike — is to notice.
