The hero of the modern myth is the victim, the emblem of the modern self the pronoun. We seem to have forgotten that we are survivors of innumerable spasms of space and time, creatures who never would have given up the gills for lungs if we attached identity to gillness.Not so with lichens.When I was a child, lichen meant to me the magical green garlands draping from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the mountains of Bulgaria as a miniature Orlando. I had no idea that Usnea longissima is just one of more than 20,000 known species of lichen — almost twice as many as birds.In the lifetime since, I have collected and photographed lichen all over the world, from the spruces lining the wild shores of Alaska to the stone walls lining the rural roads of Ireland, from Basquiat’s grave in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery to my oldest friend’s young husband’s tombstone in London’s Brompton Cemetery. And because anything you polish with attention will become a mirror, I have come to see that lichen knows many things we spend our lives learning — about adversity, about belonging, about love. Color wheel of lichen I have encountered around the world. Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.Here are some instructions for living gleaned from nature’s tiniest titans of tenacity:Contain your multitudes without inner conflict. Largely thanks to the groundbreaking research of Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter, we now know that lichens are part algae and part fungus, with a sprinkling a bacteria — three kingdoms of life in a single organism, not warring for dominance but working together to make it one of the most resilient life-forms in nature and a keystone of many ecosystems. It was through his studies of lichen that the German microbiologist and botanist Heinrich Anton de Bary coined the word symbiosis in 1879.Come to see that you can feel at home anywhere — roots are overrated. Lichens don’t have a root system to draw nutrients and moisture from the ground. Instead, they alchemize sunlight into sugar, using their plant part — either algae or cyanobacteria, depending on the species — to photosynthesize and absorb moisture and minerals from the air, using their fungal part to grow root-like rhizines that allow them to attach to nearly any surface — house walls and tree bark, dead bones and living barnacles. Contrary to the common misconception, they don’t parasitize the organisms on which they grow but only use them as a substrate.Adapt to external adversities with an internal shift. When environmental conditions harshen, lichens can shut down their metabolism for extended periods, sometimes decades. This allows them to thrive in nearly every environment on Earth — from tide pools to mountaintops, from the hottest deserts to the iciest tundra. They have survived simulations of Martian conditions and even the black severity of outer space: When a team of Spanish scientists sent the common map lichen Rhizocarpon geographicum and the bright orange wonder Rusavskia elegans aboard a Russian spacecraft to be exposed to cosmic radiation for 15 days, the lichens returned to Earth unperturbed and resumed their reproductive cycles. Become a pioneer of possibility amid the ruins of what was. Lichens are often the first organisms to grow on the denuded rock left in the wake of landslides and earthquakes, the only ones to keep living on the tombstones of the dead when the bodies below have long returned their atoms to the Earth. Know that you don’t need a partner to fulfill your life. Many lichens reproduce asexually, by dispersing diaspores containing a handful of cells from each of their inner kingdoms or simply by breaking off pieces of themselves to grow into new organisms.Leave the world better than you found it. Lichens enrich the soil of deserts, stabilize sand dunes, and create soil from stone across the long arc of their lives. They are part of how mountains become golden sand. Have great patience with the arc of your life. Lichens, which are among the oldest living things on Earth, grow at the tectonic pace of less than a millimeter per year. The continent I now live on and the continent on which I was born are drifting apart more than 250 times as fast. The Moon is leaving us four hundred times faster. Become a living poem. Lichen anchors one of the subtlest, most powerful poems ever written — Elizabeth Bishop’s ode to time and love lensed through the greying hair of the love of her life, the Brazilian architect and landscape designer Lota de Macedo Soares:THE SHAMPOOby Elizabeth BishopThe still explosions on the rocks,the lichens, growby spreading, gray, concentric shocks.They have arrangedto meet the rings around the moon, althoughwithin our memories they have not changed.And since the heavens will attendas long on us,you’ve been, dear friend,precipitate and pragmatical;and look what happens. For Time isnothing if not amenable.The shooting stars in your black hairin bright formationare flocking where,so straight, so soon?— Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,battered and shiny like the moon.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.