The following was originally posted on Michelle's website, Shamama. The site has been taken down, so I am posting this essay here.
If Only We Were Greener Things
All
the ways you imagine us—bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted
spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal—are
always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and
more. There’s always as much belowground as above. From The
Overstory, by Richard Powers.
If you grew up in
northern Michigan, you know the annual madness for morel mushrooms. If you are
savvy, you know there is a lookalike false morel out there that looks and
tastes similar. If you are also really unlucky, you know it will make you throw
up your pilaf so fiercely it will be 15 years before you can eat rice again.
Regardless of your experience with morels, you are probably familiar with the
various fungi that spring up after a rain, or you have gleefully kicked a
puffball mushroom to release the spores into the wind. It’s all part and parcel
of coming up Michigan.
I
didn’t know it, but kicking the puffball made me a part of the unending cycle
of regeneration and destruction that is nature. In recent decades, science has
been looking more closely at exactly how closely woven all our threads really
are and made a mind-spinning discovery: the wood wide web. This is the network
of fungal threads, called hyphae, that runs just under the surface of the
forest. What is so incredible is that this network includes the trees, their
roots so thickly entwined with hyphae that it can be difficult to tell which is
which. This network, known scientifically as the mycelia, is all but invisible
to the naked eye and trees use it to share nutrients, warn of insect attack and
probably much more. While some of us have always believed that the trees speak
to each other—and have even heard them—this proof has shaken everything we
thought we understood about a forest.
British
author Robert MacFarlane visited botanist Merlin Sheldrake
in Epping Forest to learn about the wood wide web and recounts the experience
in a chapter of his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey. Most striking
to me, he writes about his struggle to adequately describe what happens there
where we can’t see it:
I glance down, try
to trance the soil into transparency such that I can see its hidden
infrastructure: millions of fungal skeins suspended between tapering tree
roots, their prolific liaisons creating a gossamer web at least as intricate as
the cables and fibres that hang beneath our cities. What’s the haunting phrase
I’ve heard used to describe the realm of
fungi? The kingdom of the grey. It speaks of fungi’s utter otherness—the
challenges they issue to our usual models of time, space, and species.
“You look at the network,” says
Merlin, “and then it starts to look back at you” (MacFarlane 100-101).
This
passage speaks to me in so many ways. Specifically, it makes me think of t he
moment during breathwork with Michelle when she encourages us to “send down [our]
roots into Mother Earth.” What a profound union that would if we had hyphae
like the fungi! But this is about more than simple communion. MacFarlane wants
to penetrate and see into the network, as if to really see it is to then
understand it.
Sheldrake
posits a different perspective: that the network is, at least for now,
impenetrable. You look at the network and then it starts to look back at
you. You may have heard the Nietzsche quote about looking into the abyss
and it’s accompanying caution: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that
in the process he does not become a monster. If you gaze long enough into the
abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you” (brainyquotes.com).
Nietzsche
is warning his readers to be wary of studying something so closely that you
become the thing you seek to understand, particularly when studying “monsters.”
Sheldrake, however, makes a different word choice. He does not suggest we can
look into the network; we can only look at it. We can stare at it as
long as we like but we are not capable just now of seeing into it. We
can’t sprout hyphae from our tailbones, after all. We are limited by both body
and language to only imagine, as MacFarlane does, hearing the forest say to us
“if your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning”
(Powers 4).
We
can’t green our minds to communicated with the wood wide web, not in the way we
wish we could. On Star Trek: Discovery, the crew of the science ship
encounters a giant tardigrade. Through it, they are able to engineer a ‘mycelium’
drive that allows them to use the mycelial network to ‘jump’ from place to
place across space without ever understanding why or how. It is only when the
chief engineer accidentally ingests spores from the tardigrade that he
comprehends the effect of humans on the mycelial network. It amounts to torture
of the ailing tardigrade and damage to the overall network. Even when the mycelial
network is writ large across the universe, it is only when we somehow taking in
the spores that we can even connect in a meaningful way.
MacFarlane
dwells on our linguistic limitations when it comes to translating its lessons
to humanity. He posits that “’we need . . . a new language altogether—one t hat
doesn’t automatically convert it to our own use values . . . we need to speak
in spores’” (110) aloud to Sheldrake.
Sheldrake
agrees whole-heartedly. “That’s exactly what we need to be doing—and
that’s your job . . . That’s the job of the writers and artists and poets and
all the rest of you’” (111). The job of writers and artists and poets. My job.
As a writer, as a native-born Michigander, it is my to find the right words and
learn to speak in spores. In short, to go outside and learn to tap in.
Indeed,
Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass and Potawatomi,
insists that “[t]o be native to a place we must learn to speak its language”
(Kimmerer 48). She doesn’t mean language about a place, which is what we have,
but language of place, of the plants and trees, of everything that lives
in and on and around us. “We Americans
are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species,” she writes, “let
alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we
would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other
eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us . . . Imagine how less lonely the world
would be” (58). If our minds were only greener things…
Michigan
calls loudly to those of her natives who try to send down their roots, their
spiritual hyphae, in other places. She calls with the voice of the planet to
all her lost children who tread heavily and understand so lightly. Both
Kimmerer and MacFarlane agree that whatever the wood wide web is, it is
community. Like any human community, it allows for the exchange of information
and goods and news. It makes every living thing it touches part of the
collective whole. It is, writes Kimmerer, “the power of unity. What happens to
one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together” (__)
This
summer, my first full summer in Michigan since 1989, I grew tomatoes, basil,
rosemary, thyme, flowers. I dug in the earth for the first time as a willing
gardener. I met a worm who, when I unearthed him, I called ‘icky.’ When
informed by a much wiser gardener that I’d hurt his feelings, I made a sincere
apology and gave him back a little of his soil. When I failed to water often
enough, I lost flowers. When I did well, I had tomatoes and basil to eat with
fresh mozzarella and rosemary to lay on my Thanksgiving turkey. It satisfied me
on a primal level. I grew food. I got dirt under my fingernails. I shared my
wonder with the four-year-old next door. What a precious, precious gift to have
insulted a worm and then made up with it! I connected, just a little and so can we all.
Just
watch out for those false morels.
Works
Cited
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding
Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the
Teachings of
Plants. Milkweed Editions. 2013.
MacFarlane, Robert. Underland: A
Deep Time Journey. W.W. Norton
Nietzsche, Friederich. “Friederich
Nietzsche Quotes.” Brainy Quotes. BrainyMedia Inc, 2022.
12 February 2022. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/friedrich_nietzsche_124387.
Powers, Richard. The Overstory.
W.W. Norton & Co. 2018.
Wikipedia contributors. "Star
Trek: Discovery (season 2)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Wikipedia, The
Free Encyclopedia, 12 Feb. 2022.
