Fungi (mushrooms) are seemingly small, innocent creatures, and yet they are actually the largest living organism on earth, made up of ycelia, strong single-celled strands of fiber, snaking below ground in web-like formations. They are powerful enough to create visions, healing of soul, re-vision of the earth's soil. Some mycelium networks are so vast, they are only visible from great heights - evidenced by the blooming of their mushroom flowers in huge fairy rings.
It is said that mushrooms can help heal the world - that they, in fact, have been doing so for longer than we know. They've been keen and efficient composters for eons. Now, given the opportunity, mycelia eat and transform the leavings of 'civilizaton' - oil, pesticides, industrial waste - breaking these chemicals back down to their elemental building blocks, once again harmless and available to create life. Mushrooms are being brought into areas that are in need of soil remediation, places like New Orleans, into land fills and unstable hillsides where trees have been stripped, leaving the earth depleted of nutrients and susceptible to slipping away in heavy rainfall. Mushrooms thrive in these places, soothing, healing these scarred and poisoned landscapes.
Bless you, silent menders of a planet
torn by strip mining, clear-cutting, toxic waste dumping,
soil stripped of nutrients,
your web, of strongest single-celled strand mycelium,
unseen but for the fruiting of mushroom flowers,
you hold us, mend us, heal us.
By Barbara Dickinson 2007
Source: We'Moon '09 datebook
all i know is....give me a morel or a truffle and all is right with my world!!!!
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