Create with Geocarpon minimum
Rather than posting a giant follow up to yesterday’s description of Geocarpon minimum, I will be providing a series of shorter posts.
In this post I provide some ways to creatively engage with Geocarpon minimum. This creative engagement will hopefully help you experience being with these plants in different ways.
If you want to use your creative practice to engage structures of power I invite you to submit a comment on the proposed delisting by April 27, 2026.
I’ll provide more information about this in a subsequent post, but here’s the link to the proposed rule and a pathway for commenting.
Creative Practices
(These can be used on their own or combined)
Write, Draw, Paint etc. in Response. Read the description of Geocarpon minimum and write or draw what catches your attention, or your sensations while reading, or what you imagine when you think about these tiny plants.
Disrupt the Description. Pull language directly from the description or from the FWS proposed rule and rearrange this language to create something new out of the words.
Disrupt the Document. Use the FWS proposed rule and draw directly on it to create something from this official document that reflects your experience of the plant. You might redact words or highlight words, or draw the plant’s shape directly onto the text, or do something entirely different.
Collage. Create something new by using images of the plant, text from the description, pieces of the proposed rule, and other materials and combine them as a collage. Here are some sources of images: Wikipedia image , Flora of the Southeastern United States. You can print the materials and create hardcopy collage or use programs like Photoshop or Canva for digital collage.
Coloring. Print black and white versions of images of the plants and color them in with pens, colored pencils, paint, etc. Image sources include: wikipedia image, Flora of the Southeastern United States
Time Travel. Below I provide a time travel exercise that can serve to support your creative encounter.
Geocarpon minimum, Travel in Time
To Prepare
Grab a piece of paper or two, and pencils, pens, crayons etc. to write/draw with. (Modification: use your phone or other device to record your response).
Grab a timer. I have included timings because it helps me to do this sort of practice with a firm structure. You can modify the timings (e.g., do 1 minute for each instead of 2-3) or not use them. You can also set a timer for the response portions.
What comes from this practice may be a creative project itself, or the material for one. Or you may find that writing about the experience afterward is the creative synthesis that helps you work with the material of relationship.
The Exercise
Once We Were On Earth. Once We Were in Body
Establishing Time
A. Now
Set your timer for 1-2 minutes.
Start the timer.
Notice your breath. Allow yourself to be in this moment
Imagine the images or textual details of Geocarpon minimum. Feel your way to these beings in the glades and slicks of the U.S. So small they are hard to see. Right now, many of those emergent this year have died, having lived an entire lifespan from the beginning of winter to now. The seeds of this year’s plants resting encapsulated on the earth.
Perhaps there are tiny centipedes nearby, perhaps ants.
What do you feel or encounter in your mind as you feel your way towards the experience of sharing the world with this tiny plant?
When the timer goes off, stop and write, draw, record.
B. 13 Million Years Ago Geocarpon emerged. We were in an ancestral body with our great ape kin.
Set the timer for 1.5-3 minutes.
Start the timer.
Imagine 13 Million Years Ago. It is the mid-Miocene and the earth has been cooling over the last 50 million years although there was a warming period earlier in the Miocene that was followed a million years ago by an acceleration in cooling. This was the middle-Miocene climatic transition. The ice sheets are expanding and the forests are changing.
The continents have shifted, severing what was previously a connection between the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans. They will continue to move and later in the MIocene will close off the connection between the Atlantic and Mediterranean and cause the Mediterranean Sea to almost completely evaporate.
You are in the body of an ancient ape, probably living in forests in the African continent. You are part of a body that, in the future, emerges as humans, chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. This ancestor might be Pierolapithecus catalaunicus or a related ancient great ape species.
The ancestors of our relatives, the gibbons and orangutans took a separate pathway a million or so years ago and while we often live in the same places we do not live in the same body.
At this same time Geocarpon minimum is emergent as themselves. They are elsewhere in the world, possibly coming out of the north to find themselves in the glades and slicks of what was to become the U.S.
What do you experience in this ancient great ape body? What does it feel like to be on the earth at the moment Geocarpon mimum emerges as the being it is still today?
When the timer goes off, stop and write, draw, record.
C. 1.6 Billion Years Ago—We Were Together in Body
Set the timer for 1.5-3 minutes.
Start the timer.
Imagine 1.6 Billion Years Ago. You are in the ocean in the body of the single-celled common ancestor of both plants and animals. Soon, the ancestor of all plants, including Geocarpon minimum, will emerge among your descendants. Oxygen in the ocean and the atmosphere is higher than at earth’s origin but lower than it will be in the future. The ocean may be sulfidic (or it may pass in and out of this state) because of the heavy reliance on photosynthesis using hydrogen sulfide rather than water. The sea is possibly turquoise and black.
You are a microbe and as such your relationship to other bodies may be permeable. Your descendants may, at some point, contact other microbes and come together to create the engines that drive plant photosynthesis and oxygen-reliant cellular respiration. These descendants are the ancestors of plants and animals and fungi.
You are in this body with Geocarpon minimum.
What do you experience in this aquatic body? What does it feel like to be in our very many great grandparent’s body together?
When the timer goes off, stop and write, draw, record.
D. 3.5 Billion Years Ago—We Were LUCA or the Progenote
Set the timer for 1.5-3 minutes.
Start the timer.
Imagine 3.5 billion years ago. You are in the ocean in the body of the last common ancestor of all present life on earth. Though life has been around for a bit, you are the container for all life to come. Life is so very young on Earth. And the earth herself is just a baby.
Can you feel that newness?
Earth’s hardened crust is new, and the tectonic plates are emerging.
You contain in your microbial body or you community of microbial bodies all of what will be life.
What do you experience as you imagine yourself as LUCA?
When the timer goes off, stop and write, draw, record.
E. Return to Now
Imagine yourself in the body of our common ancestor. Then imagine emerging into our seperate pathways and traveling through time to this moment of living on the earth together, as human and Geocarpon minimum.
Write, draw, record,