DIARY OF MOMENTS ❖ life also grows underground
lessons from those squishy lil guys
Last week I went on a mushroom forage. The light lay low through the gumtrees and it was almost cold in the forest. Y and I were like little children, giddy to discover this hobby, squatting in the bush and getting dirt in our fingernails.
Our guide had said that of course mushrooms often grow in forests like this - he gestured at the surroundings - but just as much, they grow on the side of the road, right outside your house. You just have to be taught how to see them.
The reason they grow in these sidewalk cracks is human movement: spores get stuck on the soles of shoes, in the grooves of rubber tires, and they free-ride across the country like soft little hobos looking for a place to land.
And that was such a captivating image was to me: imagine being a squashed mushroom or a microscopic spore clinging secretly to the corrugated underside of a shoe, waiting to be dropped to your death in an x% of cases but, crucially, in some (1-x)% of cases, being freshly flung into a situation of renewed fertility - a better home, a worse home, or maybe about the same, you can’t really know.
It takes me back to scenes from Toy Story, adventuring the concrete streets at the eye-level of a tiny toy, avoiding the hazards of life happening up there and seeking refuge in slivers of shade cast by petty objects. There were a lot of kids movies like that, championing the holiness of getting down on ground level and loving all things little.
I think there’s a reason these stories appeal to our child-sides. To me I’m reminded that there is something sacred hidden on the underside of everything tedious and menial.
Our mushroom man was a certified fungi-finding addict - been doing it for decades, says he’s driven hundreds of kilometres to go see a mushroom he suspected (correctly) was fruiting purely on a gut instinct. He says the more you commune with the mushroom, the more it tells you about itself. I wonder if the logic is maybe something like: eat the mushroom, your gut microbiome adapts to the mushroom, so, like, mushroom gut instinct? Well, even if the logic seems to miss a few steps, I still believe him. Weirder things have happened.
So I’m curious about the secret workings of the mushroom, or specifically the mycelium that precedes it: the hidden chemistry of nutrients, root systems, moisture, pH, mingling in ways that are both unique and abundant in its many permutations, hidden underground in a sludge of mud until during an otherwise unremarkable hour of an otherwise unremarkable day, up springs forth a stalk with a small egg, which grows and reaches up and outward faster than you can get a reply from your colleague at your desk job, lol.
Everything that has ever confounded you has started like this: a system taking root beneath your awareness, in the realm of your boundless ignorance.
And it is a little overly romantic to say “well, in that secret chaos lies the spice of life, baby!”. The dice roll lands both ways. You know the same friend for ten years and in an instant recognise the spontaneous spark of love - you might call them long repressed feelings or you might alternatively recognise it as a slow and gradual becoming into two the right kind of people for each other. Or does it go the other way? You have the same nothing argument three years in a row with your spouse and then one day discover there is a stage four sarcoma pervading their bone marrow. How could this be? How could you not know all this time that you were supposed to not take each other for granted? Around our ignorance we so freely build a mythos where our fortunes are miracles and our misfortunes are our curses, and boy we can’t help but ruminate on our curses a great deal.
There are hidden systems, it is worth remembering. Whether they come from heavens through a divine decree which arranges pieces of chess with precise calculation or from a causal chain of living beings trading and generating packets of entropy between one another I can’t really say, but it also doesn’t seem to matter.
All roads lead to home: a familiar place where we can forgive others and ourselves of our own ignorance, which is inevitable rather than sinful, which itself is complex and strange and a product of every assumption that comes before and in some sense mycelial, growing deeper which each instance that we claim to know something.
At that pinnacle of the mysterious system you marvel at the pretty culmination of a life itself in all of its strange diversity; pluck a soft mushroom from the earth. This one is delicate; this one’s a little wavy; nice to look at but dangerous to eat; these two look the same but when you slice them open one has a whole host of maggots crawling out. In an interview our guide Martin Martini (real name!) said, “Everyone is always trying to track something down. May as well be a mushroom.”
Post scripts - feel free to comment / reply to this post:
I’ve finished a few books lately (five in this month). My top books were recommendations from people who read these posts! Thank you :)
A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Come Rain or Come Shine by Kazuo Ishiguro
I’m running a writer’s retreat in a couple months. I’m curious if you are a writer, what are some activities or prompts you would like to see at something like these?
I’m in a fiction-writing stretch right now, which is the most intellectually demanding thing I’ve done. It’s like a form of programming the way you are trying to anticipate a reader’s expectations and logic, and requires constant abandonment and then reimplementation of structure - which I love.
It’s been rewarding to do go down to parliament with a coalition of really great NFPs, and engage with climate impacted communities, but boy. The emotional drain is huge even in just short spurts like this. My migraines returned in earnest for the first time in years. “The work is meaningful, making you feel full. But it has physical effects on you, making you feel spent.” - L. I always forget how exhausting it is to just care.
Fun-ifying my ‘goals spreadsheet’ to look like an old school Commander Keen console has genuinely increased my monthly goal adherence, now three months in.
(Speaking of goals,) randomly calling my friends more has improved my quality of life 300%.
Nils Frahm has dominated my listening for the whole month - especially while I was reading Cold Enough for Snow.
hidden systems are terrifying tbh :(