Seeds of new life

From Plants to Fungi, ‘Seeds’ of New Life

I have been involved with plants since I was a toddler. My first word was ‘fower’ or ‘cups’ for bright yellow buttercups (There are two versions of the story) Buttercup was a nickname that I was given by my grandfather. It stuck. I guess it’s no surprise that I started out with gardening as a three-year-old under my grandmother’s tutelage. Her large vegetable plot fed us for most of the year. I seeded my first yellow summer squash into rich moist earth and watched with wonder as the seed emerged with two emerald ears.

In college (as an undergraduate) when students were decorating their rooms with drapes and bedspreads, I bought a bright red pepper plant to brighten my cement surroundings and soon had a windowsill full of plants.

As a young adult, I grew many houseplants and often talked to them, noting that we seemed to have an unusual relationship that I could feel; they
responded to my voice and touch and I believed that we were communicating, a childhood reality that I had been educated out of by the dead mechanistic scientific paradigm during my early academic years. I also gardened with herbs outside my back door, because I loved to cook and needed tasty condiments. Soon I moved on to planting a full-fledged vegetable plot. I canned what I could, like my grandmother still longing for the bountiful flower gardens of my dreams. I come from a lineage of female flower gardeners and male farmers that stretched back three generations (that I know of) but as a young person who worked and one who was frozen from loss, I didn’t make the time. When I planted my first flower garden, I fell in love with her outrageous beauty. It wasn’t long before I had created flower gardens in every nook and cranny of the one-acre property that I called home.

In my mid-thirties, I became interested in medicinal herbs. I made a few tinctures… When I discovered their efficacy, I promised myself that when I had
more free time, I would make a formal study of herbs.

After I moved to the mountains, I was free to roam the fragrant forests that were peppered with conifers of various sizes, some quite large; cedar, hemlock, fir, pine, and spruce. Logging in those days was done by men who loved their trees, so even when cut the forests thrived. I began to pay attention to different mini-biomes and learned a lot about what was growing where and why.

My mother had loved wildflowers and so now at last I was able to follow this passion too. I kept a vegetable plot, planted fruit trees for animals and birds, had too many flower gardens (!) but I also paid close attention to the wildflowers that grew everywhere I went. Living alone eventually diminished my enthusiasm for growing vegetables, and I gave the latter up.

From the beginning, I began ‘rewilding’ most of my land because I believed that nature knew more than I did what needed to grow where. Put simply, rewilding is allowing nature to determine what plants and trees grow where.

I began to study herbs in earnest experimenting with medicinal tinctures all of which I made from plants on my land. I intuitively sensed or was told by
the plants what tinctures would work most effectively for me. I was beginning to listen to plants with more attention and intention. I also became fascinated by mushrooms. How could I not be fascinated by fungi that popped up in these bountiful forests that surrounded me? I was not a forager, (and this remains true for me today) but I was captivated by the relationships that mushrooms seemed to have with certain trees, the understory, and the surrounding earth. I also loved the extraordinary shapes and colors of these fungi as well as their scents.

I spent three summers in the Amazon studying jungle remedies with Indigenous medicine men and women. The two most valuable lessons I learned
from these experiences were how important it was to listen to what plants were saying beneath words; that it was quite normal to have plants guide me
through dreams and visions (I have never used drugs); and that the plants that worked best for these jungle folks were those that grew locally. Each
medicine person had her/his own wild garden and concocted medicines in non-rational ways that supported my ‘conversations’ with all florae, my
dreams, senses, and intuitions. More recently, while living in the high desert of New Mexico I used to walk to the river and bosque (wetland) every morning before dawn. On one occasion I was in a naturally occurring altered state from walking in circles around this small oasis when I experienced sharp pinpricks, points of light rising up through my feet. I was so astonished by this fantastic experiential reality of light pulsing through rubber boots into the soles of my feet that I fell out of time. This experience occurred not long after I had heard an Indigenous scholar discuss the reality that humans were facing probable extinction if measures weren’t taken to reverse our trajectory, but that Earth would survive.

In retrospect, it seems ridiculous that I never connected pinpricks of light with my study of mycelia, which had begun with the work of scientist Suzanne Simard. Or that nature was trying to get my attention for a reason. It would still be a couple of years before I learned that the pulsing light was an integral part of the fungal network that lay just below the surface of the earth. This magical domain opened a door to a whole new reality and most recently has shifted my perspective on our climate crisis and the fate of the planet. I know now that this incomprehensible network is responsible for all life on land. Even when fragmented this fungal network is somehow able to regenerate itself and it can communicate with other parts of mycelia anywhere across the globe. Underground fungal networks have successfully survived five extinctions and will easily survive another, so no matter what we do to the earth S/he will be able to begin again. Knowing this allows me to feel genuinely hopeful. This is the kind of hope that overshadows despair.

As the youngest species on the planet, we are also the most vulnerable. Ironically humans desperately need the earth to remain relatively stable to stay alive. Yet, instead of supporting nature, we have created climate chaos. Even conservationists have things backward. Instead of ‘saving’ other species, we need to start saving ourselves. Our hubris around saving nature rivals our belief that technology will save us. Technology, America’s newest religion has already cast the dye (it interests me that we are still looking for a ‘savior’ when Nature’s Ancient Wisdom is at our back door). The most excellent online magazine Emergence states that ‘the ecological crisis is a catastrophe in slow motion’. I won’t live to see the ever-worsening plight of humans but the next generations will.

Returning the sanctity of life and sovereignty to the soil has allowed me to do two things. Although I deeply mourn the loss of each species, each forest
and field, the loss of clean unpolluted air and flowing waters, when I can align myself with the big picture, I can also feel a sense of peace. I have done what I could to sound the warning for the second half of my life. The important thing is that I tried, even if it wasn’t enough.