mushroom fugue
MUSHROOM FUGUE

In the woods, next to a stone wall, when I first saw the small mushroom pictured above I almost ignored it, because so many times I've tried to identify it and couldn't. But then I remembered that I'm getting away from obsessively identifying things. Now I'm consciously reorienting toward a more holistic mindset.

And so, I sat beside the little being and gathered thoughts and impressions relating to its brief existence. I remembered that a mushroom is just the spore-producing reproductive organ of a fungus's main body, which is its hyphae. Hyphae are white, threadlike, branching items spreading through systems such as soil, wood or leaf litter, absorbing water and nutrients. Often hyphae of certain fungus species form mutually helpful associations with plant roots, those associations being called mycorrhizae. Nearly all established tree roots have mycorrhizae, and some trees can't live without it.

Our little mushroom arose from organic-matter-rich soil. Therefore, its main body, its hyphae, inhabited a highly heterogeneous, disorderly, invisible world along with untold numbers of decomposition organisms of many kinds, and tree roots. From this seemingly chaotic environment, the little mushroom emerged with gills beneath its cap elegantly fanning out from the point of attachment of the cap with its graceful stem. If we could witness the systematic geometry expressed during the endowment of each of the cap's millions of spores with chromosomes, which must line up with one another perfectly, and if we could see the individual spores being released onto forest breezes, it would be like hearing the most expressive and cleverly structured fugue amid a seashore's unending and deep-moving cacophony of random waves and wind.

As a monist, I conceive of only one consciousness, that of the One Thing/ Great Spirit. When the One Thing manifests us physical beings of the Universe, we retain access to some of that universally expressed consciousness, possibly thinking that it's exclusively our own. Maybe the One Thing's consciousness concentrates in some of us beings more than others (humans more than rocks), or maybe it's expressed with the same intensity everywhere, just that some beings manifest it in ways human minds can't grasp.

Whatever the situation, as I sat on the moist, humus-smelling leaf litter beside the little mushroom, I was comfortable with the notion that the mushroom was consciously and with the greatest of satisfaction singing its fugue for us all.