Moss and dreams

end of year meanderings

When I take my dog out for a walk, we go up the mountain or skirt sideways along the mountain’s foot. I have been wearing snowshoes on our most recent outings; the powdered snow is slippery and it helps to use the toe spikes to hike up and down the slopes.

The trail I take follows an old logging road that regrew in thick patches of small fir trees, which over the years have been cleared back enough for a trail to snake through. Blackcap brambles poke up through the snow and then dive back in, leaving thorny loops that I try to avoid.

The layer of snow covers most of the mossy places I check on when we hike, but there are new things happening on the surface of the snow: squirrel, rabbit and marten tracks, and traces of tiny pine siskins cleaning up birch tree catkins.

I forget that it’s these walks that feed my interest in drawing, and it’s the place where I usually run into ideas as I stumble over rocks and fallen branches. In the coming year I would like to include a bit more about the experience of walking outside and the details of the woods and changing seasons.

Looking back at 2025

To summarize a year of drawing dreams, I confess that I was very erratic in my record-keeping and spent a lot of time trying to find a way to get imagery onto paper without too much fuss. I finally landed on brief pencil sketches as a way to note dreams, accompanied by text as needed to fill out the story. I am at present okay with forgetting dreams often and not always recording the ones I do remember, but I just try to keep coming back to the journal every week.

One fun discovery was sketching some of the dream imagery on clay bowls and cups. I don’t have a kiln but I do have three boxes of clay (thank you to my neighbour) and my daughter and I have been learning how to hand build vessels and sketch on uneven surfaces. I am drawn to the idea of the dreams becoming a more permanent thing through the kiln-firing process; from memory to clay to vitrified material.

Drawing a scene in a shallow bowl creates a slight fisheye or tilt-shift effect which I like, especially for a dream image; the effect is just slightly disorienting and transports me back to the feeling of being in the dream.

The other thing that happened towards the end of the year was remembering that moss is fascinating, and that when it’s removed from roof shingles and gutters as part of house maintenance, I want to replant it. My daughter ran around collecting chunks of roof moss cleaned off the north side of our roof, and the moss now lives in various planters and bowls, and I also want to make some ceramic bowls for future rescue mosses.

We also recently learned about kokedama, the Japanese technique of creating a living moss ball planter (here’s a great tutorial and fun YouTube channel too). The combination of the moss and the supported plant reminds me of the rock walls I see on hikes, where various plant species (heuchera, ferns, grasses) are coexisting with mats of moss.

Slime mold hanging out on a bed of moss near my house

This is our first try at kokedama — a jade plant is rooted in the soil ball inside of the moss coating, and I also added our air plants so that they have a source of moisture.

So I guess that’s my year-end report: walking, dreams, drawing, clay, moss. I am looking forward to seeing what grows in the new year. Wishing you a happy and healthy new year full of random meanderings too <3

Anne.