Field Notes #3: Becoming Fungal
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Oh, waylarks. Come rest here awhile. My heart is heavy. Is yours? I’m sure. Grief seems the inheritance of these times.
My fairy rock is gone. It’s gone. I know this is such a small thing. A sea of violence laps at our feet, climbing higher and higher, threatening to drown us all. But this place was an island for me. Small things can be talismans rubbed smooth with worry. Islands can be refuges as we swim against creeping despair.
I found my fairy rock with a great tree splintered across it, the stone face crumbling. The forest around it lay in tatters, abandoned by the government that should be holding it in trust for all of us. I wept in disbelief, wandering the trail backward and forward, hoping against hope that I was wrong. I wasn’t, for I remembered each first blush of spring blooming through those limestone cracks. Yes, here the hepatica smiled. Yes, up there spring beauty gleamed in a crop of special magnificence. There red ginger blushed beneath its twin leaves.
Who knows what next spring will bring? Some spring ephemerals may still bloom. Some not. But I know the dead wood of that great tree will soon feed the mycorrhizal roots of mushrooms. The ants will find havens in the mazes of the decaying trunk. They may plant new rhizomes in their meandering gardens. The mycorrhizae will wake up the rhizomes to help the spring ephemerals reach for the splintered light of spring. And all together, they will wake up the forest, tattered or not.
That is our purpose, I think, as writers, as artists, as wanderers and waylarks right now. We feed on these dark times. We point to safe refuges in the dark of fertile soil. Then, we herald light’s return. Spring was here. It is always here, becoming and unbecoming. This season of strife and decay is a stray passing thing. We bleed. We weep. We root. Then, we bloom. Allons-y.
These photos are NOT from the fairy rock, but I had to share all the recent mushies I've seen. See how they grow on dead trees on abandoned farmsteads while nearby, bees drink jewelweed beneath the transmission lines for AI data centers. Soon, those data centers will be decomposing ruins too. | © N.A. Chapman
Becoming Fungal
We must become fungal
send roots down
into their waste
and drink up
the blood from their violence
take it into the vast winding
of our entwined hands
calloused and thick with grime.
We must decompose
their sightless eyes
and devouring tongues.
We must grow
worlds
from the piecemeal
of their words
like fallen trees
paint lichen gardens
and beat out a rhythm
of mushrooms and moss.
We must speak
poetry
out of their vomit
like a butterfly
eats dung
and gleams sapphire
in the sun.
We must
grow into each other
a wholeness
in the shattering.
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