Our Long-ago Ancestor: Mycilium!

 "The interconnectedness of being is who we are," says Paul Stamets in the mind-blowing movie Fantastic Fungi. I've just been on a trip to see family in the northeast, so I haven't posted for awhile. And while I was gone, I decided to start using the "tablet" that I bought several years ago. Since I had my laptop and phone for communication, the tablet had been forgotten or neglected under a pile of books. Then I realized I am paying a fee each month for it's use, just like my phone, and that spurred me even more to begin using it! I turned it on before I went to the airport for my flight back to Iowa, wondering if it could bring up Netflix. And sure enough, Netflix came up, along with a recommendation of a movie I might like: Fantastic Fungi. So I pushed the button just to see if it worked. And what I saw next completely sucked me in. 

I have never been one to eat mushrooms much. My mother fixed casseroles when I was a kid, using cream of mushroom soup as the binder. That was my early exposure to edible mushrooms, and even as an adult I seldom eat them. Of course, as a student of nature, I have seen mushrooms in the forest, or even sometimes in my garden. I do respect them as fellow living things, but I've never studied them. That has changed! Not only will I now buy Paul Stamets's book(s), but I'm going to look into growing mushrooms here at Prairie Hill. And my mind is still spinning with the facts I learned from this film.

Amazing fact number 1: we are descended from mushrooms (mycilium). Spores of mycilium landed on this planet eons ago, when nothing else living was here. And they thrived. Eventually they split into two new groups: one which developed into our plant world, and one into our animals (our branch). 

Amazing fact number 2: mycilium are everywhere: under our feet, inside our bodies, everywhere on earth. And they have incredible networks of underground pathways. Under one foot step are hundreds of miles of tiny "roots".

Amazing fact number 3: the network that they build creates communication in the soil. Trees can communicate with their offspring or other trees through this network. Other forms of life can communicate with whoever or whatever they want. It's like a huge internet. 

Amazing fact number 4: Without mycilium, our world would be glutted with refuse. Mushrooms tend to the things that have died, turning the substance into soil for new growth. So they are part of both death and new life. They give balance to the elements of the earth. 

That's just a small sample of amazing facts about mycilium. Mushrooms are the fruiting body of the mycilium. Most of it is underground and widely ranging. Different from animals, who have a sac inside for digesting food, mycilium digest food outside their bodies. And before they move on, they send a fruit (the mushroom) up to mature and disperse spores. Taking one breath, no matter where you are, probably includes getting a few mushroom spores.

Another gift they give us, as if that weren't enough, is medicine. And the research is still going on into this field, which was stopped by the government 60 years ago because of fear of what "magic mushrooms" did to consciousness. It is even hypothesized that one of the reasons why apes quickly evolved into a species with much larger brains is because they ate mind-expanding mushrooms in their diet.

My own mind feels expanded just from learning about the far-ranging effect of a lifeform pretty new to me.  And although the facts about fungi on our earth are amazing and incredible, the thing I like best has to do with the sentence I quoted at the beginning of this post: "The interconnectedness of being is who we are." Humans have trailed off into a dead end in our development, thinking and acting as if all creation centers around us, manipulating our environment however it suits us. And now we are seeing how threatening this behavior is to our very existence as a species and perhaps to all of life. Native peoples have had a better grasp on our place in the world, understanding how we are all tied together for better or for worse. The best outcome would be that we humans finally begin to learn about the natural world we're a part of, and see our place as just another species who need to live in attunement with others. While we're doing this, fungi can be our guide and friend. I'm ready!