This is the time of the Spring equinox.  We are moving from winter to spring, from dark to light, from cold to warmth, from bareness to the vibrant flush of spring flowers and new-born leaves.  Let us also move from anxiety and dismay at world events and the state of our planet to love and hope.  Let us sow these seeds into the thirsty soil.

Equinox

This is it, the official beginning of spring.  Oh, the long awaited date and season and sun.  The sun is white, sitting over the tops of the houses to the East, diffused through the thin cloud that heralds the start of a glorious day.   It is still cold from early evening to early morning marking the hours of the sun’s absence, but it builds to a warmth you can live in during the day.

I love this day, the changeover from winter to the early train of summer.  I love that everywhere today is the same, we all have twelve hours of day and night, equal night, equinox.  And as we sail smoothly into our opening light and new season of warmth, so the south tilts into its fall, into darkness and the call of winter.  Today is a magic day, yet most people won’t notice it save perhaps a smile at the new-found warmth of the sun.  We live on our planet like strangers, not recognising its journeys or its moods, sheltered from the weather and with a ready light to hide the dark. 

Celebrating an equinox or solstice acknowledges the birthdays of our home, enjoying the relationship we have with the earth on which we live all our days.  It is also enjoying our relationship with  the Divine, whatever that means for us, seeing God in all things – the new sun rising, the hazy air sharpening, the primroses covering the lawn in gentle yellow welcome, the quickening of spring awakening the buds, calling the call to life that echoes in our blood. I desire to be out here today but I cannot, so can I take these elements of earth, air, fire and water and hold them in a burning cauldron safe in my heart?  Can I trust as trees do, or will I always bother and fuss before I find the path?  Is it part of the human condition, part of my makeup, a jigsaw dance between the bother and the bliss, learning to carry all the bits equally well, living in memory and faith at the same time, trusting as trees dig roots into deep soil, trying to enjoy all parts of the journey and not just the destination.  Today I have things to do that will call me away.  Today I hang my needs on the wheel of the sun and let it turn me. 

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.