FIELD NOTE: SPECIMEN 7-MOSS An Unscheduled Encounter in the Understory by Ulf Wudu Field recordist of the unseen. Listener to the rootways.

I did not go looking for it. This is usually how the significant encounters work.

I was documenting lichen communication patterns in the mid-understory — routine work, nothing unusual — when I became aware of being watched. Not the ambient watching of a forest, which is constant and impersonal, but a directed, specific attention. The kind that has weight.

It was eating moss. Unhurriedly. With the expression of something that has never once questioned its right to exist.