Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.
Thomas Carlyle
An Array of Mushrooms
I looked for mushrooms in the woods behind my house one day after listening to a Hidden Brain podcast about slowing down. They were everywhere - and then I learned some things I didn’t know.
They seem to appear overnight, but the mushrooms we see are only part of much bigger, much older structures. They are the reproductive fruit of a network of mycelia living underneath the earth, a system of branches and threads spanning far beyond the part we see.
They feed on wood and leaf, living and dead. (Here it’s like a forest within a forest, of mushroom and moss)
They are abundant (Shelves on a dead log)
They can be Seemingly Solitary.
They can step into a tale (Amanita Muscaria - the mushroom from Alice in Wonderland)
They can be delicate and beautiful ( Crown-tipped Corral Mushroom among leaves, shelves and moss)
They can be shy
“Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding…”
From Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” poem
They can stand together like a tiny army
“We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.”
from Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” poem
My curiosity has been piqued by the reading I’ve done this week about mushrooms. I think I will be returning to this again in the future. I used some lines from my favorite poem about mushrooms by Sylvia Plath. To read the whole poem, and a great article about how it relates to the scientific truth about mushrooms, click here.
Thank you so much for being here! I will see you next week!