Guest Post: Cultivating Hope - Lessons From Our Fungal Elders
“Doozy” is a pantheistic hedgewitch on the east coast. She enjoys connecting with magical energies through every day actions, radical activism, and intuitive engagement.
I am excited to share another guest post from my dear friend and go-to resource for bioregional witchcraft, Doozy. For context, this guest post was written on the day the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case was announced.
Continuing to fight for justice is hard. Always, and also specifically today.
When injustice happens right before our eyes, when one of our many efforts for good does not come to fruition, our inner guide of frustration comes to remind us how not okay that is, and for many liberation cultivators that I know it is a force of erosion. One piece of this that I often hear is the question of “why should I keep trying if this failed?” After a family member walks away without their mind changed during the conversation, or after an election or court case is lost, or when even after we have a victory the forces we fight are still there – there is this idea that we have then failed and that our efforts are futile.
We want those who are doing harm to learn what they are so ignorant of, how much painful impact their actions and beliefs have even when they don’t see it in front of their face and how different the world would be if they stopped. It is interesting then that we often are ignorant of that as well – how much positive impact our actions and beliefs have even when we don’t see it in front of our faces and how different the world would be if we stopped. We can take lessons on this from so very many places in nature that I could (but won’t!) ramble for years, and so for today I’m choosing to learn from the example our mushrooming fungal elders, to whom we owe everything.
In the most general of terms, mushrooms are the part of some fungi that are used to create more fungi, which they do by throwing untold numbers of spores out into the world creating untold numbers of opportunities for the world to have more fungi in it. The mushroom does not do this with success or failure, futility or hope hanging on whether each or even most of those individual spores germinate into mushrooms that the parent mushroom will see and experience. The reality is that many of those spores absolutely won’t. The mushroom does this so that the world will have as many opportunities to experience what it has to offer and what it can build as possible.
A few of these spores will soon become mycelial networks (that’s the fungus’s main body) which will become mushrooms (the fruit or reproductive system) nearby, and that is so beautiful. Some will be dormant in a place for lengths and lengths of time only to finally still be able to germinate when under the right conditions. Some will become mycelial networks that never come to (fruit)ion, and yet their existence still held together soil, helped other organisms access water and medicine and nutrients, and allowed other wonderful beings to communicate with each other in ways that truly matter. Some will decompose and transform into sustenance for other wonderful microbes that build our world. Some will get carried far away to another part of forest or even across an ocean, where the mushroom will never know which ones germinated, fruited, or were sustenance. Some will get carried even farther all the way up into the atmosphere beyond the mushroom’s wildest dreams, where they will do the magic of attracting vapor to become seeds of clouds (that really happens!!!). Even if somehow miraculously none of that happened on this round of spores, it would still be good practice for that fungus that now has another piece of evidence that it is capable of making mushrooms and spores that could do all those things. Even the process of doing it over and over again provides opportunities for other types of beings who think mushrooms are really neat (humans) to study so that those beings can get better and better at helping cultivate mushrooms just like this one in all sorts of places. Mushrooms do not see most of their spores become fruit, and that’s not always the point.
It is not only okay, but also appropriate and warranted to be frustrated and disappointed and angry when the good we try to spore out into the world does not fruit. At the same time our effort isn’t a failure or futile. Who knows when it may germinate and do good then? Who did we see or not see it sustain, even for a moment? How will it transform into something as powerful as a raincloud even if we don’t know it? What entities did it inspire to say, “That’s neat!” and research how to help us, or to do good on their own plane that inevitably changes ours, or write their version of an essay on hope? To that question of, “Why do I bother to keep doing this?” - I hear from our elders, “If you look around to see all it could do, why on earth wouldn’t you?”
Continuing to fight for justice is magic worth doing. Always, and also specifically today.
