Recently some mushrooms appeared in our front yard (a square patch of earth that contains one large evergreen bush and our garbage bins). Not just any old mushroom, these were aptly named stinkhorns, which begin as pale pink round protrusions poking up from the earth’s surface and after a while develop into phallic stems with mighty stinky heads. So there I was on three occasions with gloves, bin-bag and trowel, the first time digging up a single mushroom which I figured was an outlier. Then getting rid of a bunch of them a few weeks later, and then a batch of around nine of the nascent balls a few weeks after that. As of now, they haven’t returned.
At first I was disturbed by them, their arrival along this city block somewhat incongruous. (Though not completely incongruous, the connection to when this place was wild being closer than we sometimes presume - with plants, animals and yes, mushrooms, taking advantage of cracks that humans leave as if to say that in the right circumstances all traces of human existence will be grown over in a flash). I was also disturbed by their form, and the speed of their growth, at one point imagining them starting to grow inside me if I breathed in their spores, my extremities evolving into them. Think Pans Labyrinth imagery, with the boundaries between plants, people and creatures blurred.
Then I checked myself and remembered the reverence with which people I know have spoken of the properties of fungi. I downloaded “Fungi as your futurist” (published by Sporesight). I marveled at characteristics I knew about, like multiplicity and reciprocity, and characteristics I didn’t, like “deliquesce”.
“Some fungi experience the phenomenon of ‘deliquescence’", says the zine. “In this magical process, some mushrooms gracefully dissolve into a velvety, inky liquid. Their caps melt away, releasing spores into the environment, leaving ink for artists to play…”. (Which, the zine elaborates, can be interpreted as “letting go of what isn’t serving; celebrating the beauty of endings. Making space for the emergence of renewal and regeneration.”)
This pause to understand a bit better prompted some guilt at wrenching these living things up from the soil and dumping them in a plastic bag, which I soon dispelled by reassuring myself of the smallness of my actions, of the front yard, of me, within the enormous world of fungi.
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