Fungus is not something we normally think about beyond mushrooms for a meal.  It can seem unhelpful when we find our food has spoiled and gone mouldy.  But this function of fungi plus bacteria to break down organic matter is essential.  Not only does it help to produce soil, it also keeps our planet healthy, recycling organic material instead of allowing it to pile up unwanted.  And of course penicillin is derived from a mould.

But even more important are the mycelium networks that link the roots of plants and trees.  They were a critical feature that enabled plants to successfully move from aquatic environments onto the land.  This was a symbiotic relationship (mutually beneficial).  The fungi enabled the plants to access water and nutrients from the barren land, and they received carbohydrates from the photosynthesising plants.  It is a very intimate relationship with fungi colonizing the plants’ cellular tissue (called arbuscular mycorrhizae or AM) to maximize the transfer of nutrients.  Today 85% of plants remain in such AM symbiosis.  Trees and woody plants have developed an extracellular involvement with fungi (EcM) instead, accounting for 3% of plant species.  To quote Jude Currivan in her recent book ‘The Story of Gaia’:

While AM partnerships don’t affect the root morphology of their plants, EcM ones do.  EcM fungi can’t break through the wood-strong cell walls of their plant partners.  Instead, they form a double sheath around their roots and construct a sensing and communicating mesh of hyphae known as a Hartig net.  Increasing root branching, they expand the plants’ root systems, extending interconnectedness and signaling.  In doing so, they’ve progressively increased the distributed intelligence and learning abilities of their host plants and their ecosystems of tropical, temperate, and boreal forests….While all mycorrhizal symbioses are beneficial in boosting the host plants’ immune systems, EcM is especially advantageous.

Jude Currivan. The Story of Gaia – The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of our Conscious Planet.  Inner Traditions. 2022

Threshold

The sunlight falls,
flickers off leaves and fronds
of fern, weaves
patterns in the hedgerows that guard
the garden, tumbles
and teases the edges of shade,
the glade alight with it,
the space hugging the watching
trees that are icons,
the grass between
a prayer mat
to sit and soak in the sun’s syrup
as I lose myself
in the soaring sky.

The place changes,
lifts off from the physical, visual
reality of suburban plot
to become a world charged with the glister
of new-born buds, of ants
scurrying in the dirt, of God;
the invisible vigour of life’s longing,
the myriad unseen creatures,
the roots and the fungi,
the surging push inside cells,
inside souls, tingles in the air
like incense.

Water is such a simple thing, just H2O, for most of us always there to drink or use for washing.  We are used to a world with rivers and oceans, with rain and snow, but without water there would be no life on this planet.  There used to be water on Mars, leaving behind dried river systems, but now we are the only planet that we know of with water, with life.  70% of the earth’s surface is covered with water, and 60% of our bodies consists of water.  Water is home to 78% of our animal life. 

Water is precious, yet many areas now suffer from a shortage of water, and worldwide we have problems of pollution.  Today, when you have a drink or a shower, when you walk in the rain or visit a river, give thanks.

Water

Water falls in intimate, clinging caresses,
shape shifting to cover each surface
like words
so you don’t notice how heavy it is
when lying pooled and still
(‘though always ready to tip and slide
like mercury,
like something alive),
singing the song of the oceans inside our bodies,
carrying our blood, our tears, our heat;
or out there holding
the weight of the world and its moon
in a courtship flow of dance.

Gathered
from the air as rain,
from the ground as seeping, splashing springs,
from our bodies and houses and works as waste,
flowing from one to another in anonymity,
transferring allegiance and load
then starting all over again
as if virgin, as essence of pure,
as source of cleansing.

Take me to your drink,
to your magic of everywhere invisible power
(except the oceans
where we see you storm and spray
and lift liners, and smooth sand,
and know that underneath you
tickle the tongues of mussels
and feather the fins of fish).

Take me to the fullness of holding
in wet dissolving
and of letting go, and of moving on.