Chapter 3: The Forest's Edge

How many of nature’s secrets have we forgotten?
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Generations removed, how could we ever know something as delicate as the story of mosses?
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Some scour through handwritten notes of our oldest records of anthropology. But the “history” we have, compiled by rich white men on what they observed to be important, is insufficient. Notes from anthropologists as far back as the 1800’s hardly mention these green beauties, aside from some notes on fire pits, weapons, construction insulation for little cracks between the logs. It was found inside gloves and boots for warmth, even layered within a sleeping pad for added comfort. But could that be it? Other, much older languages have all kinds of words for these green backdrops. They have specific words for tree mosses, berry mosses, rock, water, and very specific mosses. In the English dictionary, we only have 1, reducing 22,000 species to a single type. What are we missing?
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Mosses usually cover things, they stand strong in moist, wet banks, creating a soft layer under our feet. We find them near the spray of waterfalls, where salmon jump the river. They reveal their gifts every time it rains. Just watch as the moss swell after a thunderstorm, some absorbing up to 40x their weight in extra water.
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What the upper-crust gentlemen failed to notice was the unique gift that moss provides that no other pine or grass could rival.
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Then she found it, a single entry; you can almost see the blush in the brevity of the statement.
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Mosses had a widespread use for diapers and sanitary napkins.
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Imagine the complex relationships that lie behind that one entry. The most important uses of mosses were everyday tools in the hands of women.
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What other genius solutions had our great grandmother’s figured out?

Chapter 1: The Forest’s Edge

I believe we need to study and understand ourselves, from the fuel we put into our bodies, to the environment we place ourselves in, and our response to it all.

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Expand that view to include our interactions and impact, not only on our own bodies, but our minds, our ecosystem, immediate world, the greater population, plants and animals, environment, and our successors. Where do we draw the line of where we start and end?

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Can you really draw a line around the forest edge, a line that’s constantly interacting with more beyond? Do you include that weed, that bird flying in and out, that raindrop about to fall? Do you count the air breathed, the view from a window miles away, the memory once gone, or the story of its existence?

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We can draw a line in the sand to say this is my world, my home, the space where my impact ends, but how deep into the ground do you go, how high? Are we more than that which exists within our skin barrier? How does our energy change the room? How do we influence the air and interact with those around us? How far into yourself do you look, how far into your mind where your entire universe dwells? What impact have we imprinted onto others in the few years we’ve lived?

Nature resists hard boundaries. It is porous.

Air carries pollen. Soil carries microbes. Water carries minerals. A fallen log becomes food for fungi, which become food for insects, which become food for birds. Each edge is an exchange.

Our bodies are like that too. Our skin allows many things in, your gut lining is alive with trillions of microbes, deciding what passes through and what stays out. Your lungs dictate how oxygen moves into blood. Even your thoughts are porous, shaped by hormones and neurotransmitters influenced by what you eat. Your liver has a memory of its own, creating stomach acid to break food down that it expects to get from you, before you even know what you will have for dinner.

This is why food matters so much. It is not just calories. It is information, seeping through these edges into every cell of who you are.

The Sacred Act of Eating

Every time we eat, something has to die.

A leaf, once alive, is plucked.
A blade of grass, cut.
A fruit, the bloom of a tree, picked.
An animal, once breathing, sacrificed.

Life feeds life. That’s not tragedy — it’s ecology. It is the oldest agreement on Earth.

Our in-breath is the out-breath of plants. Their exhale becomes our inhale. The mushrooms are a whole other kingdom — transforming death back into life, weaving decay into nourishment. Mold takes old food and returns it to the soil, where plants drink it up again.

We need one another. Always have. Always will.

The planet does not simply tolerate us. It can be better with us on it — if we choose to be participants in this cycle rather than extractors of it. If we see eating not as consumption alone, but as communion.

Eating is sacred.

What we choose to eat determines what others will grow. When I buy grass-fed beef, I am voting for farmers who steward land in ways that let cows live well and restore the soil beneath their hooves. When I choose leaves, I am still choosing something that once reached for the sun.

Just because something does not have a spine does not mean it has no feeling. Watch an octopus curl in on itself, solving puzzles, showing affection — they are squiggly bundles of intelligence. Read about the “Wood Wide Web,” where mother trees feed their young through mycelial networks, and tell me trees do not care about others.

Veganism, as I understand it, is a protest against industrial cruelty — the cages, the grains that sicken animals, the antibiotics that follow, the waste lagoons that poison waterways. I am in full agreement with rejecting that system.

But I also believe that the answer is not pretending food comes without death. The answer is to honor what dies, and to support the cycles that regenerate life: grass-fed animals on pasture, soil enriched instead of stripped, the return of manure as fertilizer instead of toxic waste.

We once had millions of buffalo moving across the plains, fertilizing as they roamed. Their hooves and dung built the six inches of topsoil now vanishing under monocrops. We traded that system for feedlots and depletion. Their farts were never a problem for global warming that now are blamed on grain-fed industrial cows that make up majority of the modern food system.

To eat consciously is to see the whole system. To respect the lives taken and the lives supported.

Welcome to the forest. Let’s get into the weeds.

"Can you really draw a line around the forest edge, a line that's constantly interacting with more beyond?"

Where Does the Forest Begin?

I believe we need to study ourselves, from the fuel we put into our bodies, to the environment we place ourselves in, and our response to it all.
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Expand that view to include our interactions and impact, not only on our own bodies, but our minds, our ecosystem, immediate world, the greater population, plants and animals and fungi, the environment, and our the people that come after us. Where do we draw the line of where we start and where we end?
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Can you really draw a line around the forest edge, a line that’s constantly interacting with more beyond? Do you include that weed, that bird flying in and out, that raindrop about to fall? Do you count the air breathed, the view from a window miles away, the memory once gone, or the story of its existence?
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We can draw a line in the sand to say this is my world, my home, the space where my impact ends, but how deep into the ground do you go, how high? Are we more than that which exists within our skin barrier? How does our energy change the room? How do we influence the air and interact with those around us? How far into yourself do you look, how far into your mind where your entire universe dwells? What impact have we imprinted onto others in the few years we’ve lived?

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Why not try it? Stand at the edge of any forest and try to draw a line where it begins. You can't do it. Which overlapping leaf do you count? Which rain cloud? What about those seeds being taken away in a bird’s beak? The forest's influence extends far beyond its shade, creating microclimates that nurture specific plants and attract particular animals- changing temperatures many miles away. .

Beneath your feet, impossible to see without a microscope, mycorrhizal networks take over, tiny mushroom threads connecting tree roots in an underground network of nutrient- and signal- sharing. Just a spoonful of this hummus, this dark brown dirt, holds miles of these networks. The air you breathe carries pollen, spores, and the exhaled breath of countless organisms. A single handful of forest soil contains more living organisms than there are people on Earth.

We also find that the forest edge is a bit magical. More than entering a new realm of fairytales, the edge is where ecosystems meet. Food resources at the edges are able to tap into multiple environments and add to the diversity of sustainability. We need the deep forests beyond just the edges for animals and all kinds of species that require it, but the edges are still transportable places in story and medicine—places where different worlds meet and create something richer than either could do alone.

This is exactly how your body works—not as a separate entity with clear boundaries, but as part of an intricate web of life- an open ecosystem that includes the soil microbes that feed your vegetables, the bacteria in your gut that help you digest, and the minerals in your bones that came from ancient rocks broken by the seas.

When you understand this interconnection, making bone broth becomes more than cooking—it becomes a practice of resurrection, of drawing life from what appeared to be dead, of participating in the endless cycle of transformation that connects all living things.