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I love mushrooms.
I love to eat them. I delight in finding them in the wild, especially when they appear unexpectedly along a familiar walk.
Some are tiny and delicate, others absurdly shaped. They arrive in colors that don’t seem quite believable. Sometimes I’ll walk past a patch of earth one day and find nothing, only to discover that mushrooms have pushed their way through the soil by the next morning.
But what I love most about mushrooms is that most of their lives are hidden.
What we casually call a mushroom is only the visible fruiting body of a much larger fungal organism. Beneath the soil, inside a fallen log, or threaded through some other substrate is a network of microscopic filaments called hyphae. Together, they form the mycelium.
The mushroom is what catches our attention.
The mycelium is where so much of the living happens.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
I am living through a season of grief, depression, healing, and transformation. Some of the changes in my life have been unwanted. Others I have chosen. I’ve learned that choice doesn’t protect us from grief. We can know that something needs to change and still mourn what we leave behind. We can choose a new direction and discover that we don’t yet know who we are while walking it.
And lately, I don’t feel much like a mushroom.
There have been other seasons of my life when I was decidedly aboveground. I was doing things. Making things. Caring for people. Writing. Leading. Producing. Going places. There were visible markers by which both I and other people could recognize my life.
These days, much of what matters most is harder to see.
I meditate.
I journal.
I sit with friends.
I have long conversations that don’t necessarily solve anything.
I pet the cat.
I play with the neighbor’s dog.
I sit in my grief.
That last one is important.
Because I don’t simply mean that I grieve, as though grief were another item on the day’s list of therapeutic activities. Sometimes there isn’t anything to do with grief. Sometimes I simply inhabit it. I feel what hurts. I notice what is gone. I remember. I allow myself to miss things that aren’t coming back.
None of this looks particularly impressive from aboveground.
Our culture tends to recognize recovery through its fruiting bodies.
>> We went back to work.
>> We finished the degree.
>> We cleaned the house.
>> We started exercising.
>> We went out with friends.
>> We made something.
>> We became productive again.
Look! A mushroom!
And those things can matter. I want some of them, too. I want greater energy and creativity and participation in the world. Depression hurts. Grief hurts. I have no interest in romanticizing either one.
But I am beginning to question the assumption that visible flourishing is the best evidence that healing is happening.
Maybe sometimes we are looking in the wrong place.
Mycelium does not spend its underground existence doing nothing while it waits to become a mushroom.
It explores its environment. It responds to moisture, temperature, nutrients, threats, and other organisms. It breaks down organic matter and absorbs what it can use. Some fungi form intricate relationships with plants and other organisms. Fungal life is profoundly responsive to the world around it.
There is something in that image that feels increasingly familiar.
My grief is not happening in isolation. Neither is my healing.
The conversations with friends matter. So does sitting beside my wife. So does scratching a cat behind the ears and feeling my body settle for a moment. So does playing with a dog who has absolutely no concern for whether I have accomplished anything today.
These aren’t interruptions in the serious work of recovery.
They are part of the life happening underground.
Perhaps what I once thought of as an interior season is actually a kind of communal interiority.
I am still sensing the world around me. Still discovering where there is nourishment and where there isn’t. Still extending tentative threads of connection. Still noticing which relationships can hold the person I am becoming and which environments no longer fit. Still giving and receiving care.
I am still participating in an ecosystem.
It just doesn’t always have the social markers we associate with productivity.
And this has made me suspicious of another story we tell about recovery: that healing means becoming who we were before.
We say we want to “get back to ourselves.”
I understand the longing.
There are parts of myself I miss terribly.
But I’m no longer convinced that the goal of transformation should be restoration.
Floods change landscapes.
Loss changes us.
So do love, age, relationships, disappointment, courage, trauma, wonder, choices, endings, and beginnings.
Even the transformations we choose rearrange the terrain.
Perhaps one reason recovery can feel so frustrating is that we keep waiting for the old mushroom to reappear from soil that has fundamentally changed.
I don’t know what my next aboveground iteration will look like.
There is grief in saying that.
There is also freedom.
I don’t have to spend this season reconstructing the person I used to be. I can pay attention to what is alive now. I can notice what nourishes me. I can grieve what has died without demanding that it immediately become something useful. I can extend toward relationship. I can withdraw from what depletes me. I can rest.
And I can wonder.
Someday the conditions may change. Something may push through the soil. I hope it does.
But I don’t know what shape it will take.
Maybe healing asks me to stop demanding that knowledge of myself.
There is one more temptation hidden even in this metaphor.
It would be easy to tell myself that all this underground living is worthwhile because someday it will produce something beautiful aboveground.
Meditate now so I can be productive later.
Grieve now so I can move on later.
Rest now so I can work later.
Heal now so I can become useful again.
That’s just productivity culture wearing a mushroom hat.
The mycelium does not exist merely to produce the mushroom.
The underground life is not a waiting room.
And neither is mine.
Petting the cat counts.
Sitting with a friend counts.
Grieving counts.
Resting counts.
Not because these things are secretly making me more productive.
Because this is what being alive looks like right now.
There may come another season of fruiting. I hope there does. I am curious about the person who might emerge into it.
But I don’t need to become my old self again.
And I don’t need to produce something visible to prove that life is still happening.
For now, much of my life is underground.
For now, I am mycelium.
And there is a whole world of living here.
~
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