Deep Shallows

The trip was going sideways. It started normally. Your average hallucinogenic haven. By the third Saturday of each month, I typically need to retreat to that haven to purge the nine-to-five, nine-to-five, nine-to-five drudgery. The little hippy girl down the road made me two heart-shaped chocolates that I took with me to the woods. She sold them for twenty bucks a pop but would drop down to ten if you brought something shiny or interesting to sweeten the deal. This time, I’d brought a lavender urchin shell that washed up on the beach with all its spines intact. I visited the ocean almost daily, and I’d never seen such a pristine specimen. 

There was a strong urge to keep it, but I decided if I swapped such a precious gift for my mushroom chocolates, it would help honour the trip. The more thick volumes of mushroom facts and tracking guides I borrowed from the library, the more convinced I got that they were really running the show down there. Deep ancient beings, mushrooms kept their business underground. This helped prevent humans from being reminded too often of their awesome powers. And good thing. There is a subset of society that might try to nuke ‘em if they knew just how many connections and influences they had beneath the forest floor. 

When I presented my urchin shell, delicately placed at the center of my palm, her eyes went wide and she made a hungry grasp for it. My instinct was to pull away but I stayed steady. I wanted her to be gentle. But this was her gift now, and I had to return home quickly so my own gift wouldn’t melt in my pocket.

I tried to be somewhat intentional about these things. Before heading out to my favourite spot in the woods to sit and watch my head swirl, I sat in the sun and made a little prayer. It felt a bit silly. Religion was never part of my upbringing. But since doing these trips more frequently, I couldn’t deny the aliveness of what surrounded me. As long as I framed my prayers as more or less casual chats of gratitude towards the towering maple tree that threw such good shade, or delight for the chunky bunny who left belly grooves under my bushes, I managed to get through.

Today my prayer thanked the mushies themselves. Mycelium is the vast underground network whose fruiting bodies are the mushrooms we see above ground. Although they look like separate mushrooms popping up across the forest floor, they are actually all limbs of the same underground organism. As I started to understand this, I saw something of myself in this structure, something of humanity. Today I asked the mushrooms if they could show me what human mycelium might be.   

Once I arrived at the park, I headed straight for my favourite spot. Tucked against a broad pine, the bark pleasurably pressed against my back, the first wave of nausea came and went. Then the soft edges of everything started to glow, and some rainbow iridescence started pooling at my feet. These sensations and visuals tended to gently escalate over the next hour or so, but this time, something different happened. With an intense whoosh of energy, the forest swallowed me, and I no longer had a body.

I felt vulnerable. As if my invisibility made some other part of me starkly seen. I started to hear laughter all around me. But not human noise. A primordial crackling of life force wheezing through branches and roots down below. The trees were laughing at me. This is when I realized I had my own trunk and meagre twigs. Were they laughing at my tiny leafless branches?

Suddenly my thoughts shifted to my insides, where I could feel sap swirling up and down my long veins. Then I sensed my roots firmly in the ground, and calmness overtook me. At that exact moment of contentment, my body let loose again and I became mud. Every few minutes, I went from a thick pebbled form, into a fuzzy sprawl of moss, and then the steady coolness of a boulder. Each time I got my bearings in the new form, I sensed some offended energy push me back out.

Eventually, I came back to being a two-armed two-legged being, belly down, with my face pressed against cool earth. My nose inches from the ground filled with the scent of peat and earth after rain. Breathing heavily I heard an impossibly quiet and clear voice whisper “We’re just too different. You don’t belong in the woods. Go home.”

My entire body convulsed once, then twice, and an intense wave of sensation bombarded my senses. Shame prickled my skin and as I started to weep I touched upon a deep, hidden grief. Somewhere between my daily grind at the office, my bent posture in front of screens, my compliance in systems that feasted on resources and belched pollution, had I forfeited my nature? My psyche plunged into sterile concrete halls, their sharp angles and glorified design. I worked in a skyscraper whose shape was meant to mimic our mountain neighbours. The mountains could no longer be seen because these buildings obscured the view. More tears came. Pulsing rhythms of traffic and alarms, crosswalk signs and fluorescence flickers, endless faceless crowds I couldn’t find the edge of all rattled through my bones.

I wept and wept until there were no tears left. In the complete hollow silence that followed, an even quieter voice revealed: your thoughts are your mycelium. So long as you think this way, you will be separate. If your thoughts return to us, you can come home.

Still splayed out on the ground, I felt my mouth fill with tiny bits of grit as I spoke out loud “I am nature. I am nature. I am nature.”

The little hippy girl down the street saw me crossing the road the next day. I was wearing my normal clothes, but no shoes or socks. She gave me a half-smirk and asked if the chocolates tasted good. She’d added nutmeg and cinnamon this time. I nodded and asked if she found a good place for the urchin shell. She assured me it had a crowning placement on her nature altar just beside her pebble collection. Walking away, the concrete beneath my feet was cool and bumpy. I breathed a bit deeper, connecting to the soil that was somewhere down below. Deep enough down where we were still, all connected.