Fruiting
Bodies
May
12 2020
The
mushrooms appear overnight
as
if they had materialized
out
of the ether.
They
look like alien creatures,
as
if spores from space
had
seeded the earth.
Under
cool grey skies
in
a damp mat of fallen leaves
they
rot almost as quickly,
first darkening and shrinking
before becoming black necrotic lumps.
And
end in goo,
a
small quivering mass
on
the sodden lawn
we're
careful not to step on.
Like
watching a sped-up film
of
flowers blooming.
Except
here
it's
involution
and
death
and
decomposition
compressed
in time,
the
cycle of life, completed
before
our eyes.
Perhaps
a preview
of
our own eventual end.
Under
6 feet
of
cool wet earth,
when
the dark matter
of
the fungal world
will
reach into our mortal remains,
its
delicate hyphae consuming us
from
the outside in.
When
we'll be returned
to
fertile soil,
completing
the circle
from
where we came.
Death,
as restoration.
Fungi
that
flower, then die,
after
spreading dense vaporous clouds
of
tiny spores
like
toxic fruit.
And
our own short lives,
returning
to the soil
of
mother earth.
I had
just finished reading this article in the New Yorker (May 18,
2020 – see below) before sitting down to write, and was reminded of
the vast, mysterious, and brilliant world of fungi; most of which,
like dark matter, we are utterly unaware.
But how
essential this family of life is. Their still poorly understood but
crucial symbiosis with forest trees. Their inscrutable networks,
communicating, learning, and colonizing the world. Their essential
place in the soil. Their potential for medicine, materials, and food.
On the
other hand, their spores can infect our lungs, and their fruiting
bodies can kill us.
We pick
mushrooms, in season. We watch them rot, and are repelled. Which is
all most of us know of them. So it's worth being reminded that when
we are buried (if we are not otherwise disposed of!), it's the fungi
that will take us back: make us useful again; give some meaning to
death.
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