Every fungus carries a story

Every fungus, just like every being on this earth, carries a story.

For fungi, these could be stories of dynamic enzymatic degradation,

the loss and reclamation of saprotrophic gene clusters,

of interspecies relation comprised of ancient unions and Phanerozoic parasitisms,

of living life hypogeously in the pulsating darkness of the rhizosphere,

of drifting as a spore in the stratosphere

or riding oceanic currents, circumventing the world before finding a cozy corraline niche.

Or maybe it’s a story of spending years nestled endophytically in the tissue of a plant cell waiting for a disturbance,

or budding as yeasts in a termite gut,

or acquiring pathogenic virulence from the acquisition of bacterial genomes as you pray on the porous epidermis of amphibians,

or having a body woven of threads one cell thick and ever reaching, be an anastomosing haven for endobacterium.

Whatever the story may be, the fungi are constantly yielding insights,

softly and harshly

cryptically and intrepidly,

revealing the nature of reality in a way that extends forwards and backwards in time-

to that of the early earth and what may be waiting beyond the threshold of the Holocene.

They share in their own enigmatic lifeways and natural histories

patterns that illuminate the very essence of evolutionary ongoingness.

I spend time with them and I am ushered into a remembering of both temporality and foreverness,

the impermanence of form

and the immortality of ecological continuity.

That one day the carbon atoms of my body will be a carbon atom slithering through a mycorrhizal symbiosis.

They help stitch together epistemologies- the world as we know it and the world as we don’t

and in leaning into their ecological warps and wefts,

I believe

our perspectives can widen

beyond dogmas,

beyond binaries,

beyond the control-hungry deracination of animacy

and scarcity-driven hoarding of resources.

The more we pay attention,

it seems,

the more porous we become to this fungal sixth sense-

one of being multitudes,

being everywhere at once and nowhere in particular,

woven into a deeper story of belonging.