You can see the mushroom in fully glory in the video version of this episode at: https://youtu.be/AP8So5mpomI
I first met my friend the Maitake Mushroom on a hiking trip through a forest about a month ago. My herbalist friend and I were going in search of mushrooms and I had been advised by them that the most rare and delectable of mushrooms was Maitake, a being who grew at the roots of the oldest oak trees of the forest and was “very shy.” So shy that she did not like her name to be spoke aloud or for us to be actively looking for her. From the beginning, I identified a lot with this mushroom. The part of me that is shy, the part hides, that does not believe that the sensual, creative, emergent parts of me can ever be seen by other humans, really resonated with this mushroom-being in her deep discernment and tenacious protectiveness of her own revelation.
So my friend and I commenced the forest hike, walking at different paces and separating for a while to each be in our own rhythm. And pretty soon I found myself off the main path, up a hill, stubbornly searching the roots of every large oak tree until I got stuck in a thicket of raspberry bushes. At some point in enacting this rigid searching pattern, I noticed a similarity with the way that I often approach creative process and emotional healing work, stubbornly trying to find the right way to do the thing, the perfect “understanding” or “realization” that will open me into a different kind of perception, that will help me to be “special” and “accepted,” the one who finds the thing that other people are looking for.
Eventually I gave up in my anxious searching and made my way back to the open path, giving up on finding any Maitake mushrooms and allowing myself to sink into a spacious savoring of the forest. As I walked, the forest started to talk to me in that way where thought forms arrive beyond words…sensing into the impossibility of trying to grasp at something that by necessity arrives at a gift.
And in this attuned state of listening, I met up again with my friend (who had also had no luck in their search) and we began to walk together. A few moments later, I off-handedly glanced sideways at the base of a tree we were passing a mere four feet from the open path and said “who’s that friend?” pointing to the fruiting body of a half-hidden brain-like mushroom growing lumious pearly white out of the soil. “That’s Maitake!” my friend said in surprise. And so this is the way that I came to know the Maitake Mushroom that I have been in ongoing conversation with.
This interview is another fractal of the journey from grasping stickiness in raspberry snarl to open path attunement to the voice of the forest—I’d reached another stuck point with my thesis work of feeling like I couldn’t describe this system of six textures of animist relationship that I’ve been exploring in my thesis work as a kind of channeled cosmological mapping from the Long Body. Every time I started to talk about the six layers or the other cosmological elements of my deep knowing, I would start to freeze or get foggy and be unable to speak about it while being seen. But it turns out that the mushroom is fine with talking about all of these things. So I will leave it to her to give voice to these Long Body Prayers for bringing the humans back into felt sense relationship with the ecosystem. Blessings and gratitude to the fungi!
Share this post