Every time I enter a rain forest and see its extraordinary abundance of life forms I feel lifted by a sense of gratitude for being able to apprehend so much life, all at once. So many stories, so much delicate geometry, intricate, growing and evomving before my eyes. The tree pushes up, the vine climbing the trunk, stretching a coarse matrix of hairy roots across the bark, which is already densely decorated by competing webs of colored lichen. Moss grows in the root-hairs, storiing water in its spongy bulk that the vine (and all the plants who grow embedded in the moss) uses to grow when it isn't raining, and then the densifying moss becomes a sort of aerial soil for ferns, other species of moss, orchids, countless plants small to large, and even more trees, creating this three-dimensional filling of space with roiling, intermixing, growing life. I could spend a lifetime studying just one of these trees and understand less than 1% of what's going on. Over and over, we fall for the forms, the trolls, fairies, our attempt to understand the complex by anthropomorphization, hovering over an amazing, tiny fungus as the other hikers blow right through. Amanda has an amazing eye for even tiny mushrooms; we bought a guide, and now we have already eaten two species...
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