A Very Shy Mushroom
An excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer
SOURCE
The beginning of things is always in this moment, this tightened seed pod closed fist of remembering. Pale green blossoming dripping from exhausted lips. The forest begins in you, in your attention, your moving towards the opening, carrying what is precious. The holy protection of that which in the next moment must be given away. Your gaze resting on all the lonely places. In you the power to ignite coal, to burn again the flame of ancient life. Your lips the myth that stills the air, whispering branches, all of it your river flush with life.
A Very Shy Mushroom
I am tangled in a snarl of raspberry bushes, refusing to turn back because I just want to search the next few oak trees at the top of the ridge beyond the thicket. I am searching for a mushroom, a rare and delectable fruiting body called Maitake who grows at the roots of very old oak trees.
My herbalist friend Fauna Gold has warned me that Maitake is “very shy.” So shy that she does not like her name to be spoke aloud in the forest. So shy in fact that in many years of foraging, my friend had only met Maitake a mere three times.
I think to myself that I identify a lot with this mushroom. The part of me that is shy, the part that hides, that does not want all the textures of my embodied experience to be reduced into words, really resonates with Maitake’s shyness and resistance to being found.1
A competitive edge enters today’s foraging expedition as Fauna and I split up to walk at different paces through the forest in search of Maitake. Because I feel so connected to this mushroom, I want to be the one to find her first.
As I embark on my quest, my vision narrows and I start methodically glancing at the roots of every oak tree I can find, losing a sense of the uniqueness of the trees and plants that I pass by.
In this fixated searching, I follow a deer path off the main trail and up a hill, deluding myself that I am still listening to the guidance of the forest. I blunder into a thicket of raspberry bushes, trying to get to the ridge of oak trees on the other side, still feeling the dopamine surges of “maybe it’s just down this path, right behind this next tree.”
It is as if I am in a subtle form of trance or somatic possession—thinking I’m still centered and rooted, but actually operating from a state of disembodied abstraction within which I have lost touch with actual reality.
This kind of somatic possession, called sympathetic activation by contemporary nervous system discourses,2 is what most of us conditioned within dominance culture inhabit as our habitual default for everyday life.
Sympathetic activation is linked to what neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist describes in his stellar book The Master and His Emissary as the left hemisphere of the brain’s perception of reality, which disembodies and fragments complex systems in an attempt to understand them.
I call this shape of perception Seed Mind because it concentrates reality into concepts like seed pods, little zipped packets of information we can perceive the world through, abstracted from the slower, complex territory of our sensations and embodied responses.
This kind of focused trance state is a necessary aspect of our biology, conserving our energy through mental mappings of reality that we can quickly navigate the world with in urgent circumstances of threat.3 The danger comes when we perceive the world only through Seed Mind, getting stuck inside the conceptual spinnings of our mind-maps while gating out the felt sense of our aliveness.
Anishinaabe scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer is gesturing towards Seed Mind’s reductionistic shaping of perception when she talks about the lack of vitality within the vocabulary of Western science in her essay The Grammar of Animacy:
Science is a beautiful language, revealing the intricate mechanisms of the world...But beneath the richness of its vocabulary, its descriptive power, something feels missing, the same something that swells around you and in you, when you listen to the world… My first taste of the missing language was the word puhpowee on my tongue. I stumbled upon it in a book by Anishinaabe ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay, a treatise on the traditional uses of fungi by our people. Puhpowee, she explained, translates as "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.”
As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But, I think in scientific language, our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. That which lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.
In the three syllables I could see an entire process of close observation in the damp morning woods, of the mystery of their coming, the formulation of a theory for which English has no equivalent. The makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies which animate the world.
How do you tell from the inside when you’re caught in the perceptual narrowing of Seed Mind? Indicators that I notice for my own system are how invested I am in finding a solution, whether I feel an intense urgency to accomplish it, and whether parts of me are wanting to be “special” or to prove myself.4 Often the energetic pattern of holding up and away, deceiving myself that I’m actually rooted, comes from a place of avoiding sadness or fear. This perception also locks me into a competitive orientation, desperate to win the competition so that I can be loved.5
Snarled in tenacious branches, I begin swearing at the raspberry bushes, finding my attention bifurcating into simultaneous exasperation and amusement at the way that Seed Mind has landed me in the middle of this situation.
The Seed Mind part of me has reasoned that Maitake grows at the roots of aged oak trees, so therefore if I put enough effort into searching every oak tree in the forest, I will eventually find Maitake, raspberry bushes be damned.
But this method of pursuit does not yield results in terms of finding the shyest of mushrooms.
For there are many oak trees in the forest and Maitake doesn’t grow at the roots of most of them. The conditions contributing to Maitake’s moment of puhpowee are a weaving of such transcontextual complexity that I will never be able to comprehend.
Systems-poet Nora Bateson speaks of this as she describes how, by the time that something emerges, the particular outcome has already been formed upstream in the “earlier overlapping and combining of subtle experiences.”6 So it is with any living process, from the fruiting of a mushroom to the shaping of a culture.
Growling and snarling at the thorns snagging my clothes and scratching at my skin, there is something kinkily satisfying in my threat reaction getting to be acted out in such a literal, physical way through my tangle with the raspberry bushes.
It is as if my nervous system has needed to go through the physical sensations of the fighting for my worthiness that Seed Mind has landed me in.7
After my encounter with the raspberry bushes, I give up my frantic searching and make my way back to the open path. I give up on finding the Maitake Mushroom.
Freed from my focused quest, I begin to enter a form of perception that I call Forest Mind.
As I walk, my sensation ripples outwards to all the beings around me, my gaze diffuse and open.
I began to savor all of the beauty that exists around me: the vibrant green leaves tinged at the edges with reds and oranges, the simple presence of a delicate aster flower guiding me back into a space of ease.
From this place of open attention, the forest begins to speak to me in that way where thought forms arrive beyond words. I feel in my body the impossibility of trying to grasp at something that by necessity arrives as a gift. My thinking slows and lengthens into the receiving of felt sense impressions, arriving as poetry in my imagination.
The seed never goes away, even as roots unfurl into relationship, trunk unfolding into widening rings. A tree is never just a tree, a tree is also the forest, seedlings nourished by relationship, by the holding of soil. Each of us a fractal of seed and forest, and the earth that holds us into remembering.
As I walk, I daydream about the agency of fruiting bodies and mycelium. The forest begins murmuring about internets and social networks as also forms of fungal reproduction, that what humans think we are controlling with our brains is actually a process that has been sporulated by fungi for purposes far beyond our human awareness.
In this attuned state of listening, I meet up again with Fauna on the forest path and we begin to walk together, chatting about the creation of their next herbal brew. A few moments later, I off-handedly glance sideways at the base of a tree we are passing, a mere four feet from the open path, and say “who’s that friend?” pointing to the fruiting body of a half-hidden mushroom growing luminous pearl-white out of the soil. “That’s Maitake!” my friend says in surprise.
And this is how I meet Maitake Mushroom.
There is deep discernment in the rhythm of my revelation. I am like that spark of inspiration, that something that is longed for, which so often you try to grasp or manifest. So often you try to drag me out into a place where I am stuck, where I am not seen as an interweaving of relationships but I am just seen as a delicacy that is a kind of reward. When I am approached in that way, my life force shrinks back into the ground and I become invisible. And because of the depth with which I am connected to the field—interweaving mycelium of relationship and root system—my invisibility is a powerful spell, my invisibility is the way that I have a choice about listening for the ones who attuned enough that I feel welcome to appear. —Maitake Mushroom
Maitake’s shyness reminds me of Nora Bateson’s word aphanipoeisis, the “unseen coalescence towards vitality” that creates the conditions for new creativity to emerge. (The concept of Aphanipoiesis comes from Nora’s essay of the same name: https://journals.isss.org/index.php/jisss/article/view/3887). The greek word root aphanis, is a reference to that which is obscured.“Not necessarily hidden,” said Nora in the Warm Data Labs training, “just unseen.” This relationship to the unseen is the very orientation that has been suppressed by the reductionistic culture of my people, which expects everything to be see-able, explainable, able to be used. Some things are not meant to be looked at directly. Some things must be left submerged into “the unseen realm of intersteeping combining” (another Nora-ism from the Warm Data training).
See Bonnie Badenoch, Deb Dana, and Sarah Peyton.
Sarah Peyton talks about this in her workshops, in which she calls sympathetic activation the“getting things done” perception of reality.
Somatic practitioner Larissa Kaul often calls out these indicators when they are facilitating, inviting participants to “relax effort” and give themselves permission to “do it wrong.”
This is similar to a concept from Gregory Bateson called “symmetrical schismogensis.”
This is a quote from Nora Bateson’s essay “Tearing and Mending: Transcontextual Learning and ‘Healing’”
There is something to that physical enactment that feels relevant for contemporary culture where most of the things that trigger our threat reactions are in the conceptual sphere (even though they often have specific material consequences in terms of survival and belonging), which makes it difficult for our bodies to navigate nervous system activation when there is no “there there” that would allow us to engage in a somatic process of literally fighting or running away.
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