In search of our mothers' gardens

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one of many manifestos for mycelial tenderness

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one of many manifestos for mycelial tenderness

a little poem!

bushra mustafa-dunne
Oct 6, 2022
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one of many manifestos for mycelial tenderness

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‘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.

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one of many manifestos for mycelial tenderness

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