Fungus Among Us

Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: June 2023

Every so often I fall in love with a word. Its music nestles into my brain where hundreds of earworms previously camped. My current crush is on Mycelium. He meanders my mind, until, like a cat, finds his happy place, kneads a furrow, and burrows in. There, he purrs a rhythmic meditation until my heartbeat throbs in tandem.

This mushroom romance began when I watched Fantastic Fungi on Netflix. For days I avoided viewing it, thinking it to be an overdone fun-guy joke. But finding nothing better, I surrendered and was drawn into an hour of mycelium magic.

Eons ago, when asteroids crashed into our planet, they sent up layers and layers of dust and debris that blocked sunlight. Plants and animals perished. But the fungi, the third branch of living things on Planet Earth, survived. They broke down, that is, repurposed and absorbed all the debris. In the end it was Fungi that inherited the earth. Get ready for this: Our ancestry is closer to fungi than any other kingdom. Yep, we are descendants of fungus.

Knowing that, am I still in love with mycelium? You betcha. Now I know why the homophone, silly, worked its way into the word. The joke is on humanity. We are just stumbling, bumbling shrooms with spore-atic behavior.

The fungi were prehistoric hazmat-ters. They cleaned-up everything from aisle number one to aisle number-infinity. And they stored all that cooked-up carbon in their underground network for later use.

They still store what’s needed today. We are walking around on trillions of miles of underground fiber networks that clean and connect our planet parts. They can even devour oil spills and turn them into hundreds of healthy oyster mushrooms. Put another way, if we didn’t have fungi, we would get a buildup of plant matter that would choke the earth and us along with it.Fungi are truly the key to our survival.

In addition to loving the sound of the word, I am heartened by what mycelium can do. They are intelligent in the sense they respond to the environment. They seek out food. They defend themselves and others. Said another way, they solve problems. Isn’t that the definition of intelligence?

Wine lovers of Highlands . . . saprobes (the mold, fungus, and another cilium, penicillium, that rot fruit and make cheese) are responsible for your favorite sips and nips and cheeses.

In the big picture, mycelium and all their pals are the digestive tracts of the world. In the end, that will be the thing that saves us – if we get our act together.

Hooray and hallelujah. There is hope. I encourage you to watch Fantastic Fungi. There is plenty more info to digest, as it were.

Uh-oh. Syzygy just caught my ear. Excuse me. My new word affair calls to me.

I’ll catch you up on my syzygy crush next month.

In the meantime, may your shrooms be spore-atic (in a good way) and your planets happily align.