A Creation Narrative Leads to a Surprising  Equinox Encounter, part 2 by Sara Wright

Part 1 was posted last week. You can read it here.

Yesterday on the day before the equinox I returned to my favorite hemlock forest after another morning of unproductive research on the mycelial web. The scarcity of information on this critical source of all life on land is troubling. As my frustration mounted I heard a little voice say, ‘Go visit with the hemlocks’. I did.

 After I crossed the bridge into the forest something amazing happened. An invisible cloud of incredibly fragrant mushroom scent slipped over me like a shroud. I just stood there for a moment inhaling sweet earth, astonished and bewildered.

Then I began an intensive search for the origin of the scent. Yes, there were mushrooms here and there, but this cloud seemed to be following me. It stayed with me wherever I walked – around – not below me. The scent was not coming from the forest floor – it was in the air. After searching every niche around the brook sniffing my way along, I started to climb the steep hill into the darkest part of the hemlock forest. That’s when I saw Her. A hemlock tree I have walked by and touched a thousand times suddenly materialized into a goddess. She did not change forms; but suddenly I saw a female figure whose lithe and curved body was whole, later split into two elephantine arms with delicate fronds that reached to the sky. For the second time that day I just stood there dumfounded. How in all these 40 plus years could I have missed seeing Her for who she really was?

That’s when I noticed the fragrant mushroom cloud had begun to diffuse. Could it be that the Tree Goddess had been calling me using her mycelial mushroom scent(s)… I gazed down at a few fungi lying at her feet that connected this tree with many others and I thought about our cultural obsession with light from above, when earth’s light has its origins in unbroken underground highways.

A few days previously I had my small field cut, an annual ritual that I repeat every September around the equinox. The masses of bushy four-foot asters goldenrod and milkweed had all gone to seed, the wild roses had thousands of dark red hips. Finally, I could walk around and through my field without being dwarfed by the wild plants that thrived from the earliest spring throughout late summer into early fall before dying back to their roots. Having an open circular space and being able to sit and listen to the insect cacophony, the evening choral chorus that had replaced birds’ origin the spring was a joy I looked forward to at dusk each day. This cutting away felt just right.

 However, a month ago I had also made the choice to have tree limbs cut around the house for safety reasons. The logging people were coming the following day. Because I knew that individual trees feel pain, I was dreading this cutting away. Trees were going to suffer loss of limbs because of me.  Not surprising my bones and muscles ached as I experienced what to me felt like hopeless carnage. That evening after the men were finished and I was alone again, I felt heartbreaking grief and a sense of dislocation as I witnessed the shorn trees and open air around my house. I was so depressed. I could feel the land around my house struggling to adjust to the radical change, so was I.

It was after this second cutting that I tried desperately to lose myself in further mycelial network research until I was nudged to enter the forest.

 After being with the Tree Goddess, I continued to spend a couple of hours attempting to solve unanswered questions by following more mushrooms trails to no avail. When I felt the familiar frustration mounting, I decided to come home.

I must give this up, I thought.

 Isn’t this what’s asked of us during the autumnal equinox turning?

Let go.

Accept the Mystery

 After climbing the hill to the house that day, the pain and dislocation that I had been experiencing around severed tree limbs lifted. The Tree Goddess whose roots were entangled with mushrooms and mycorrhizal fungi had restored a sense of peace.

As it turned out writing this year’s story formed the body of my equinox ceremony even as it helped me understand what I needed to do.

Let go of trying to understand for now.

What I think I need is to learn how to be in relationship with the light I cannot see!