Mushroom Mysteries

 

It's funny how when you get interested in something, suddenly it seems to pop up everywhere.  Watching Fantastic Fungi led me to reading the book.  Then, Deena Metzger recommended Entangled Life:How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.  So, one afternoon I was sitting in my recliner reading it when I happened to look up and to my left.  There, right on the table next to me, I spotted the three mushrooms rising up out of the soil of my potted anthurium.  I have never seen mushrooms come up in a potted plant before.  Such synchronicity!  Being no mushroom expert, I tried to identify them, but there were several possibilities.  They sure looked like the photos of Snowy Inkcaps, but I can't be positive.  No matter.

One of the things I have been contemplating lately has been how we are all knit into the fabric of life.  I am trying to really feel that, to understand that, I am a jewel in Indra's net, individual yet connected to all things.  Sometimes I like to make SoulCollage® cards for what is working in and on me, and so I made one on this idea.  That way I can look at it on my altar/writing table every day.  Here it is:

I find it amusing to see the knitter (who is herself knit).  And, of course, there's a large mushroom, too.  Why?  Because mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of mycelium.  And mycelium connects plants and trees in an invisible network beneath our feet.  

I had never really thought about the fact that mushrooms (and mycelium) are not plants.  Nor are they animals.  They are another thing altogether, as I'm beginning to understand, and our lives are dependent on mycelium.  Mushroom are food, healers, and remediators.  Mysterious and magical.

My little white mushrooms opened a day later, and the day after that began to decompose.

I have been trying all morning to find something I read in a book on indigenous wisdom so that I could cite it properly here, but it's just not making an appearance.  It really impressed me, and I do remember it, so with apologies to the author of the book, I will paraphrase.  The idea is this: we westerners have been trained to see a hierarchy of life in this way:

1. Humans
2. Animals
3. Plants

We're at the top.  Nothing we consider inanimate counts.

But indigenous people view it this way:

1. Earth
2. Plants
3. Animals
4. Humans

Each one depends on the ones above for its existence.  Plants can't live without the earth, animals without plants and the earth, etc.  This makes so much sense to me, and speaks so clearly to our interrelationships rather than our separateness.  But now that we know about mycelium and its fruiting bodies, perhaps it should be:

1. Earth
2. Mycelium
3. Plants
4. Animals
5. Humans

Let's put ourselves in perspective, within the web of life.  There are mysteries we don't see that are happening all around (and under) us.