A Story of Home

home is where the heart is, where your roots are, where the secret places become known

I’m so glad you’re here! Moments is a place to explore connecting with nature, appreciating the wonders unfolding in the world all around us all the time. I hope my photography + stories will inspire you to be curious, be amazed, and then do it again!

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It was a long road to our homestead in Maine. And maybe you can hear it in the way that I typed those words, maybe you can hear the way my keystrokes became contemplative and weighty and deliberate, I’m not sure, but I mean it was metaphorically, transformationally, like deep in my spirit, a long road.

We arrived in Maine after a year of travel that began in the far northwest corner of the nation, almost at the Canadian border on the Washington coast. We traced a giant smile-shaped arc through Texas, Alabama, and Florida, and up the East Coast. We stopped just before we ran into the Canadian border in Maine.

It was almost as though I had stood in our home in Bellingham, Washington, and said, “This is almost what I had in mind, but I think I want to be facing the opposite direction.”

We had left behind all kinds of traditional pathways and charted a course that was full of unknowns, and it had been a long road in more ways than just the drive. But we were finally here. We were moved in. A late autumn night had fallen. My three young kids were tucked into bed. A fire was crackling in the woodstove. I was looking out the window into a dark forest beneath a diamond sky.

I realized that gratitude was over-brimming my eyelids in salty swells, as it sometimes does. I realized, in this moment, that I had never thought I’d find a place that felt like home, and now we were here.

With a new home stretched out before me, I expected to discover new things. I expected to learn new names of new flowers, new trees, new mushrooms, new birds…But I never expected to discover an entirely-new-category-of-thing-that-I’d-never-even-heard-of-before!

It happened on a wander through the woods. Just strolling along, enjoying the moss, breathing some dappled air, listening to birdsong. And something caught my eye. And I looked closer.

Oh, look! It’s a…flower? Wait, it’s gotta be a….fungus? Oh my goodness, I’m seriously not sure what it is. What is it?

I found myself tapping “white forest flower or fungus” into a search engine, and wondering how it was possible that I literally couldn’t decide whether what I was looking at was a flower or a mushroom. It’s a distinction that, my entire life, has seemed pretty obvious!

As it turns out, these are Ghost Plants. Or Ghost Pipes. Monotropa uniflora. You could consider them ghostly, I suppose.

To me they look more like angel’s wings. Or more like stardust that has fallen to the forest floor and gathered into communities, determined to rise in new form.

They are unbearably cute. They unfurl from the forest floor. One day, there is a pile of moss. Perhaps the first shimmery curve of a stem becomes visible, nose-bud still buried deep in mossy comfort.

The next day, there is thriving community of stardust angels.

They are easy to appreciate in person, and tricky to photograph. They’re nestled deep in the shadows of the forest floor. Their crystalline beauty is delicate. They’re all curves. They love a fluffy jumble of moss and sticks and leaves - which are a distracting background!

They definitely invite you to draw near, and be curious, and be amazed. What are these secret blossoms blooming in the secret woodland spaces?

How can a flower exist, and grow, and bloom, and bear seeds, without a speck of chlorophyll? The stem, the leaves, the bud, the blossom, all perfectly sculpted, all entirely translucent pixie crystal, not the slightest hint of green…

The Ghost Plants have made an arrangement, it seems, and earned a name for it. They are called myco-heterotrophs, or more rudely, mycorrhizal cheaters. That’s all very scientific, of course, except for the cheating accusation, which I think is shamelessly unfounded. Ghost Pipes simply rely on the kindness of their neighbors.

In the forest, for long ages, there has existed a partnership between the towering canopies above and the forest floor below. In the treetops, leaves harvest sunshine and produce energy. Way down below in the soil, fungus decompose detritus and extract minerals. We see them above ground only when they blossom into mushrooms, but their webs of filaments are busy beneath the surface all year long. And it’s in these secret places, hidden from view, that the fungal network reaches out to the tree roots and trade is established, minerals from below for energy from above. This is a mycorrhizal marketplace.

Colonies of Monotropa uniflora nestle specialized roots into the marketplace and tap into the thriving exchange. They give nothing apparent in return, and so they are labelled parasites. But they’re so lovely, and the fungi and the trees so entirely unharmed, that this hardly seems fair 🤣

Monotropa uniflora is a beautiful flower with a fascinating story, a gift of wonder from secret woodland places. A plant that refused to abandon its home on the forest floor to gain access to the sun’s rays, choosing instead to enter into treaties with the fungus and the trees. Or stardust that fell from the sky and forged a new path to weave a home among the mosses. Either way, a tiny secret that made a new home even more special…

Come closer, the Stardust Angels whispered. This is our home. Now it’s your home, too.

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