Fungi: Where The Wild Things Are
In the moments that I am able to have my mornings unravel in the way I prefer, I am slow to rise. I take my time opening my eyes while snuggling against the cool side of my pillow. I reflect on the dreams that stopped in, I sink a bit deeper into the imprint of myself from the night before and if I’m lucky, there is a warm body laying beside me also reveling in the sweet sentiment that is a slow rising.
A slow morning.
I index the flora growing around me with the same approach; slow and unfurling. I am in no rush to figure them out as much as I am curious about how I can forge a genuine connection with them and inadvertently, with myself.
When I think about fungi, a host of lives flash before my eyes. As uncompromising as life may become, mycelium feels to be the sweet spot, a gentle coaxing showing me the inherent intricacies that live and breathe unconditionally beneath the soles of our feet. At the minor risk of sounding too sentimental, which I am known to do, and breaching upon ‘woo-woo’ territory, which I diligently choose my words in an effort to avoid emulating New Age Spirituality, I still must admit that I have found myself many a times returning to fungi whenever I need guidance on how to return to myself. Whether that be for a meal, a warm cup of tea or a trip to the edges of my subconscious, fungi meets me, and all of us, wherever we need.
In the edges of the middle and beyond.
In preparation for this reflection and to refresh myself with all the ways mushrooms have touched me, I rewatch a treasured documentary of mine, ‘Fantastic Fungi.’1 I walk away from the film with a sparkling seashell— a renewed perspective. I like to think of perspectives like little seashells; little Marcel’s2. I love collecting them and washing them off, sometimes offering them back to the sea or asking them politely if I can take them home with me. If given permission, I fill my basket with the endless expressions of perspiration and make ornamental jewelry out of them. Forged kin. This time, I walk away from ‘Fantastic Fungi’ understanding more intimately how inherently indigenous fungi is.
When I think about mushrooms, I have no choice but to also reflect on mycological-centered cultures of Turtle Island. There are so many ways that mushrooms teach me about honoring the ones who have stewarded this land since before the disruption of colonialism.
Fungi strengthens my practice of decolonization.
In the way that I have come to know radical mycology, diversity is an afterthought. Where a discussion of fungi springs up, there are sure to be a centering of cis-male, white perspectives. Although their enthusiasm is quite endearing and the child-like disposition that fungi coaxes out of them is mostly disarming, it is also difficult to ignore the crouched elephant in the room and the irony of it all. Western science has overly emphasized the prioritization of logic and overall dispossessed indigenous science and knowledge. To now watch the west come around to the fascination of fungi, a species revered by so many on this land for millennia’s, drives a dull knife into the heart of my chest. I think about all the displaced, all the wisdom, all the martyrs that have been suffocated all in the name of “progress.”
I am delighted each time I see fungi take up room in the western world. Fungi has played many roles within the perception of the states: an outsider, a fugitive and now, a saving grace. I am interested in all the ways that fungi is naturally subversive under the confines of an empire. Fungi is fugitive;. mycelium is inherently subversive to a surveillance state. These organisms teach me how to persist and resist under lengthy systemic breaches that can’t be soothed in one lifetime. They also teach me how to not take on the labels that a state bent on my subjugation assigns me. In this lifetime, I’m an outsider. In my next, perhaps a fugitive and as all states do, I will eventually return to the title of “martyr” someone who sacrificed their statehood for their honor.
Someone honored in their death but not in their waking life.
I want to resemble the wisdom of mycelium, I’d like to embody what it means to be so deeply endowed with the concept of kinship that I become like fungi and will myself towards those who will themselves towards me. I’d like to reconstruct my idea of community with mycelium in mind. It doesn’t feel silly to say that fungi are sturdy family members and I’d like to eventually be a comrade that fungi could also recognize as kin. In more ways than one, fungi moves me, inspires me and metabolizes me to reimagine the systems around me and the eventual systems that will be planted as we see the predictable fall of the faulty one we have before us now. My brain is consistently revolving around decolonization, the longterm effects of US imperialism and my position in all these dizzying lived realities. I am excited to sit with these trying times and be in conversation with national liberation. I hope to put myself into action the same way mycelium roots itself into the ground of our earth.
I hope to find myself more embodied, more anchored and of course, closer to the root of it all by the end of this short blip of a lifetime. In the meantime, I will admit, I am completely enamored by this experience and indebted to this blink of a life.
Sending my most uninterrupted intonations of gratitude today to the one who carries us all - Planet Earth :) If you are reading this on Earth day, then I am sure to be along a northern California coast, my lover in tow and admiring some boisterously tall Redwood trees. I offer a collection of songs in collaboration with ‘Hello World’3 to cement my appreciation.
Now go, let the music take you somewhere beyond this world as you sink your feet into the land that made you.
Have a Wonderful Earth Day :)
With warmth,
Zo