A Creation Narrative Leads to a Surprising  Equinox Encounter, part 1 by Sara Wright

Walk lightly
pay keen attention…
practice gratitude
but not at the expense
of truth
take sparingly
 share

 an Underground Web
writes the Story
 my roots
belong to Earth

 ‘Listen to
  feathered voices,
  seek mushroom clouds
keep breathing deep
into the forest floor
feel that luminous Light
  rooted beneath my feet’

(my fall equinox prayer)

During these days of mindless violence and fearful political upheaval, I feel driven to enter the woods on a daily basis. Lately, I haven’t even left my property. As I cross the bridge over the brook, I brush by the first lacy hemlocks and lovingly touch a branch of witch hazel whose lemony fingered flowers reach for mine. I am on the trail of mushrooms, but not as a forager.

 I am drawn to these fungal fruiting bodies because I am trying to learn more about the complex relationships between certain fungi that emerge as mushrooms and their relationship to the trees around them. Some fungi that are in a symbiotic (or mycorrhizal) relationship with one tree or many, do fruit above ground but there are only about 20,000 mushrooms in all. The rest (which is most of the fungal world) fruit underground.

I am obsessed with these fungal webs that are not only pulsing with light but know what each root tip is doing everywhere the fungal net is intact because information is passed from tip to tip instantly at the speed of light.

The fruiting bodies of the mycelial network are the only visible evidence of this mysterious world of fungi that support all life on land and without which we could not exist.

 Roughly 700 million years ago a chlorophyll producing alga and a fungus climbed out of the sea and became partners. Alga could photosynthesize, gather energy from the sun. Fungus provided purchase. The two exchanged nutrients; algae provided fungus with carbon and sugars, the fungus ate minerals and exchanged them with algae. Together they began to ‘mother’ the beginning of plant life on land. Fungi possessed the characteristics of both animals and plants. First fungi, lichens, then mosses with rhizomes, finally green plants with roots. After a time, the first animals appeared. Millions and millions of years passed in between. Humankind arrived a mere 200,000 years ago.

What western scientists ignored until recently was what they couldn’t see – the development of these underground fungal networks that stretched across the entire earth like a delicate global net.

Only now are some beginning to credit mycelia with what they do: support all life on land…

Billions and billions of tiny threads/rootlets called hyphae merge into this impossibly intricate web that connects every living being to another just beneath our feet, a communicating  light baring network.  Masses and masses of underground ‘roots’ not only create new life and stabilize existing life, but they protect and support bio-diversity. This sounds like a science fiction story – does it not?

 Today the networks no longer stretch across an unbroken earth because humans have destroyed them by building roads cities, airports, mines; the list is endless. But all is not lost because even a fragment of mycelia can regenerate itself (Herself?). These underground highways continue to transport and sequester a third of the world’s carbon. Mycelial networks also create soil. Billions of miles of Mycelia exchange carbon, sugars, carbohydrates minerals with the roots of one/some/all living beings just below the earth’s surface. It’s worth repeating that light travels through mycelia. Some bio luminesce, and sparks of this light pulse as they flow beneath our feet. It’s interesting to note that about 700 mushrooms (that we know about) also glow in the dark above ground.

Although the reality and importance of these networks may be new to westerners, they are not new to Indigenous peoples.

Māori women celebrate sovereignty of the soil with a word I can’t even pronounce… these peoples have known all along about the critical importance of mycelial networks to life.

Pygmy women honor the sanctity of the earth by dancing to mushrooms to call them into being (google pygmy women dancing – you tube videos). 

Robin Wall Kimmerer, scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass (a book every feminist needs to read) tells us that her people, the Anishinabe, use the word “puhpowee” to describe the spirit or force of mycelial networks that cause mushrooms to erupt from the earth overnight. She goes on to say:

“Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own”.

It turns out that this is the most ancient of stories.

Suzanne Simard, forest scientist (Finding the Mother Tree) intuited these mycelial relationships between trees and rootsas a young girl and became a scientist to prove what the child felt.

The two most amazing aspects of soil sovereignty for me are that even fragments of mycelia are capable of regeneration and that they are pulsing with light.

 Life will go on in some form on earth regardless of our ongoing ecological catastrophe. Although it will take a long time to regenerate a healthy ‘wood wide web’ if the damage is too extensive, Nature will eventually prevail.

Part 2, next week.