one of many manifestos for mycelial tenderness
a little poem!
‘When the fungi live in the very seed that will become a tree, their role lives somewhere between midwife, parent, lover, and friend, helping the tree to tap into the rich nutrients of the soil and the community of other beings that constitute an ecosystem. Put more simply, fungi taught plants how to enter into the underworld. And it was only in the underworld that plants learned how to make community … Fungi taught plants that survival isn’t about individuation. It’s about becoming radically involved. So involved that you let your friends into your very genetics, into your root systems.’ (Sophie Strand, ‘What is the underworld’)
I found out recently that mushrooms as species are more closely related to humans than they are to most plants. Not only that, but that they are the key to the persistence of existence itself; celebrating it by choosing the depths, the source, choosing to take root there, among and within the messy intersections, the crossings; the life from death from life again and again and – whisper – a part of you knows we have always known this, that our reality is truly nothing but the top layer of that primordial subterranean. A cluster of shadows on the wall; Only an utterance from beneath, from the roots that interlink, join hands, bottle sunlight and propel it against gravity. There is nothing solitary about us, really. Nothing ‘radical’ about this involvement after all… This wonderfully inevitable: touching (growing nurturing sharing space giving and taking space, breath, food, life) in the dark. Beneath the beneath, within the within. There can be no 'giver' or 'taker' here. We are a great tangled armspan of a single cosmic embrace. perhaps this is why Re-membrance (with beads numbering 99, 100, 33, 59, or 108) is really nothing without the circle of thread that holds it together. Perhaps the thread is the purpose of the practice, after all. To imagine a world where this truth is acknowledged is enough to make me weep. Even the attempt at the dream is rife with hope and grief. I dream of a restful leaning in a collectively recognised, communally preserved (cupped in the hands like water for ablution), spiritually grounded kinship (messy and selfless and well fed) with all life forms. Sometimes I dream of the earth doing with us what we have done with it when we anthropomorphise it make it woman, father, archetype. (I suppose that is what God does when God fills holy books with stories of our ancestors when they are taken by floods or split seas or miracles, or brought to justice by songbirds, bees, spiders, and she-camels. God makes us dreamed-up metaphors in the story of earth’s majestic steadfastness) To touch and be touched; to hold and be upheld; to feed, to water, to embrace. So much of this attempt in imagining is bound up in a dream of abandoning fear. a dream of safety, you know, that bones-deep, atomically resonant kind of safety. In the country where old men sleep in roadside ditches, you will be, at first, anxious to check on them, but later bewildered by the peacefulness of their smiles. You might see the most contented ear-to-ear star-to-moon root-to-stem smile on the face of a man whose body blocks the road. It seems it is at the margins, in the dark, with the deject, the obscure, that we are most inclined to lean in, most likely to be sure; sure enough that we’ll be held, in the ever-present safety of webbed mycelial fingers. sure enough we’ll sleep well enough in the middle of the road; sure enough that you will find us; sure enough the love stays, the tenderness stays, whether you can see it in the dark or not.