Mushroom as Genesis

In the beginning there was mushroom. The fungus came and conquered; it spurred life, absorbed death, and it is still here. Nothing lives forever but the mushroom comes close. It creates all, tolerates all, destroys all, engulfs all – a cyclical transmigration of life from one existence to another. Fungus, tree, dirt, fungus. It is all the same – different iterations of one cosmic utterance.

There were fungi in the room where I was born. It was June in Toronto and the Nigerian doctor breathed spores onto my skin as she unearthed me from my mother’s open wound. My first breath, quick and beautiful, filled with little fires that set ablaze my pristine lungs. The fungus and I were two beings – the ancient one and the newborn, the pink-fleshed and the imperceptible – already bound at the cellular. Our greeting was electric, my blood vessels and its mycelium fettered mycorrhizally. I know you, I said, you were there where I’d come from too.

Mushroom as True North

It was Sunday and I headed out for the woods. Mother used to feed me wood ears that grew on decaying logs near the shack where she once lived, high on the Loess Plateau. The shack itself was piecemeal and decaying, patched up by wooden bars saturated with nascent spores. My mother’s family clung to it like the wood ear does to dying trees. They always come out after the rain, she said, pointing at a cluster of black-brown jelly protruding from the withered corpse of a red oak. It had rained just before I headed out for the woods.

It was warm and humid for October in Providence, the air fragrant and lyrical with life. My yellow rain jacket stuck to my skin as I ventured slowly into the dense foliage, eyes trained on the ground. Threads of sunlight shone through the canopy like blonde gossamer. Here, every movement took on the gilded tint of an ethereal dance. Fallen leaves, tender with moisture, carpeted the forest floor; among their green and yellow hues I searched for the secret of these woods.

I was lost as soon as the branches closed behind me and the glaring roofs of houses disappeared in the pale gray sky. I was in a place where all reminders of civilizations, all things familiar to modern men, were too thick to penetrate. There were no signs, no bearings, no cellular connection, only the potentiality of mushrooms which permeated the very fabric of this forest. With every step I was coming into contact with a colossal mycelial being that pulsed beneath my feet. It enveloped this vast citadel of tranquility, undergirded it, and guided me through its meandering darkness. That and the voice of my mother.

Mushroom as Lullaby

The first mushroom I spotted had alabaster skin, wet and dewy as if bathed in milk. A drooping skirt of a partial veil decorated its thin, succulent stem. Slightly bent, it poked its ovular cap from the shadow of a fallen log, poised delicately like a bowing ballerina. I dug at the base of the mushroom with my bare hands, pushing dirt and debris away until I found its foundation. As I unearthed its slender body and held it gingerly in my palms, it appeared so passionately alive that I believed it to be on the very brink of tears. This moment... I thought, how lucky I am to bear witness to this moment. It suddenly became clear to me what Whitman meant when he said that the very flesh of things could become a great poem.

In our old apartment, my mother kept a book of children’s songs on my nightstand. Those nights when I couldn’t fall asleep or when I was sick with fever, she would sit at the edge of my bed singing Chinese lullabies until I drifted off. There was one in particular that struck a chord in the depth of my brain, so much so that I often found myself humming its simple tune. The name of the song roughly translates to The Little Girl who Foraged for Mushrooms. It sung of a little girl who, with a woven basket on her back, went to the forest barefoot and collected so many mushrooms that they outnumbered the stars. When she sang, mother softened her typically tense and demanding voice. It was as if in those twilight moments, when I was deliriously balanced on the edge of consciousness, she decided to set down her weathered armor and indulge in a fleeting moment of maternal tenderness.

As I held the little white miracle of a mushroom in my hands, I felt a strange and irresistible urge to whisper a lullaby in its “ears.” I would sing to it the story of my home, the songbook full of memories, and the little girl who foraged for mushrooms.

Mushroom as Kaleidoscope

After the first harvest, a shroud was lifted and suddenly there were mushrooms everywhere: brown and red amanitas with spotted caps, woody polypores marked by conchoidal rings, chicken of the woods in their psychedelic orange folds, and tiny jelly babies aglow with transparent fragility. The forest floor, to the eyes of the forager, became a night sky studded with stars of fungal fruits. In my proximity to these mushrooms, I began to see the woods, complete with birdsong and an occasional white trillium, as a phantasmagoric web of entanglement. The connection between living things spread and undulated until soil met concrete, at which point it washed dead upon the shore of humanity. I laid on a patch of soft grass in the shadow of a tall elm, viscerally cognizant of the senses of this forest and the fungi that buttressed it. Light fractured and fell kaleidoscopic on my face. The air was atomic.

Mushroom as Bodhisattva

In my reveries the forest in which my grandmother’s body laid surfaced before my eyes. She was dead before I was born, buried in a makeshift grave on a wooded hill overlooking a small valley. On Tomb Sweeping Day, years ago, my mother and her sisters led me along a meandering ravine that carved zigzags up the hill. At her grave, which was marked by a small stone plaque covered in moss and mugworts, we burned incense and fake paper money that was supposed to be useful in paradise. As black smoke rose slowly toward the canopy, I found a large cluster of snow fungus on the upright trunk of a Chinese hazel, meters from her grave. It is your grandmother’s gift to us, my mother said, in return for the memories.

As I left the woods that day with my little white mushroom, I wondered if this fungus hadn’t always been here, if it hadn’t lived, died, and chose this patch of forest over Nirvana. A tree falls, a person dies, the fungus takes us all into its sarcophagus. We give it our waste and it offers us enlightenment. We fall sick and broken into its embrace and it delivers us from torment. As I clambered my way out of the forest and onto the highway, I wondered if mushrooms were not the guardian angels, the patron saints, and all the other mothers of this world. I wondered if they were not the mothers of this forest, of cyclical regeneration, of life and death.

In the beginning there was mushroom, and it will be there at the end too. In our beginnings there were mothers. We make of what we can in the fleeting in-between, and hope that these women, in one form or another, will catch us at the end, too.