The mycelium network
learning how to survive from the forest floor
Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter that is about mushrooms and resilience and connectedness. At least for this week.
When I go on walks, I try to find the tiniest mushrooms I can.
I pull out my earbuds, and I look. I crouch. I push aside the dead, wet leaves. I hold my breath. If I touch them, I ask for their permission, and then I ask for their forgiveness. When I stand up suddenly, I get dizzy. I see so many different kinds of fungi, and I know none of their names. Big floppy yellow or tiny shooting orange or puffy white balls. Instead of looking at the graffiti or the litter or the dog shit or the deer shit I am looking for tiny signs of life, tiny signs of wondrous, interconnected communication.
When I check my phone, there is a buzzing in my head. Everything makes me so sad, so angry, so afraid. I am immediately overstimulated, and then shut down. I wander my house in a haze, barely able to cook and clean and take care of a small house that is home to six creatures, many of whom need extra care. I was supposed to be ready for this moment. I have been studying it for years, decades really. I know why it happened. I know what the people in power believe and how they think and how dangerous they truly are. I was born to be someone who explained and rallied and led the resistance. But now, when my time to shine is supposedly here, I find myself wanting quiet. Wanting small moments of peace. Wanting to get off the wheel of spending all my energies ruminating on future horrors — a wheel I have been running on since I was very, very small. .
When I crouch down to stare at mushrooms, I forget to breathe. But as soon as I stand up, the air rushes back in. I look up at the trees and the last few leaves hanging on. I am learning to notice how different they all are. Serrated or smooth edges. One or two or six leaflets on a single branch. Yellow or red or brown. When they fall, they feed the earth, they feed the mycelium network. They create fairy rings in the midst of a burnt-out neighborhood on the outer SE edges of Portland, circles of mushrooms I step into and desperately wish to be transported into another portal.
But instead, I remain. I remain in my body, in my neighborhood, in my country. I remain connected to the underground network of people who care about the earth, about humanity, about survival for all instead of a few. I remember that so many of us are being drawn to the ancient practices of our ancestors -- staring in awe at the moon, breathing deeply the fragrance of the trees, bathing in water and letting our nervous systems relax into a state that isn’t predicated on fighting or fleeing or fawning or freezing. I am connected to so many people who are being drawn to survival and by being fully alive to all that there is to experience in this life: gratitude and sorrow and humor and suffering. When my brain wants to race down the well-worn ruts of being terrified of the future, these days I hug myself and remind me that I am simply human-sized mushroom that will one day go back down into the earth.
Just like I was meant to.
It really is as simple as nature, our bodies, and our ancestors. The ways of the witch, of the pagan, of the person fully alive to being connected to something so much bigger than themselves. It’s the bark I collect and the mushrooms that make me squeal and the crystals I buy at flea markets and keep in my pockets. It’s me writing this to you, connecting across the networks that have been built to commodify the world but that we use to heal. It’s the careful study of the land we find ourselves on, and all the mythologies we have been told about who owns it and who it belongs to. It’s being gentle and compassionate with ourselves as we live through yet another trauma, the incessant cycle of news and authoritarian leaders, as the rot at the core of the American story comes out in full force and with no way to deny it.
We will keep doing what we always do — taking the decay and the rot and transforming it with our very lives. Our little mushroom selves, finding each other all across this planet.
I’m sending so much love to everyone today. May you find small moments of peace, connectedness, and self-compassion today — and in all the coming days ahead.
"Our little mushroom selves, finding each other all across this planet." OMG, I'm not crying over here or anything. Beautifully stated.
I am loving this turn your writing has taken. I also feel like I need to thank each star, the full moon, the creek that healed my eating disorder, the ducks that paddled through the creek reminding me that to have a body is not a monstrous thing—it’s perfectly normal, in fact—the trees that stand together or apart. I also struggle to make dinner, wash up, tend to my kid after even 10 minutes of scrolling. I’m learning to nap instead of scroll. I also love that you are connecting so deeply with nature without knowing the names of everything. I sometimes feel like the ability to notice and categorize details my brain doesn’t pick up on is a pre-requisite to being nourished by our Mother, and I feel like a fraud when I’m out there delighting in the varied textures and colors of leaves, but don’t know the name of a single one—or when I say hello to bird that greets me but don’t know its name or habits. Anyway, thank you for modelling connection without the inner critic insisting on mastery.