Pagan Godspell

Greetings from a Day of Gorgeous Light here in the not-so-wild-midwest, where thoughts of spring cleaning and deep breaths of air full of promise are shot through even the smallest moments, from a good bowl of oatmeal to dreaming about the future of the planet. It’s been bad for me this past week or so – I can’t deny that. When despair sends its chilling effect over the course of my days, it can be a struggle to see the Good News in the world. Yet, it does persist. In and among the heartbreak and the fear are still those days of music, food, the return of birds, the fragile shattering goodness of the world in its insistence on unstinting beauty and grace. It becomes as necessary as breathing sometimes, to immerse in the holiness of snow and grass and the promise of hyacinth or tulips – to meditate (marinate?) in all these spectacular gifts – to get funky and down with the bedrock of soul – to say – okay okay, today I will do a dance out in the backyard or scatter tasty seeds out to the late-winter birds, and I will see that radical bliss, maybe hiding under a first mushroom or an old corner of the shed.

So today: a paean to the Holy Mushroom, Champion of Rot – capable of transforming even our most egregious shit into a fruiting body of shocking, sexy life.

Yep – I love mushrooms – I think they’re awesome creatures. I have been a lazy amateur mycologist for years, relishing the witnessing of a full-grown, gorgeous amanita muscaria while hiking in the Rockies, spying out tiny little brown mushrooms (known in the mushrooming world as LBMs) while jaunting around town, getting caught up in the morel madness that strikes midwesterners every spring (and if you’ve ever had some fresh wild morels sauteed with garlic and olive oil, you’d know why), and even peering down to get a good look at the nasty stinkhorns that pop up in my yard on occasion. Mushrooms are, as is everything really, outstanding embodiments of Good News.

I have been reading a beautiful book on traditional foods called Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice that emphasizes the importance of connection and holistic balance in food. Nutrition is a continuing source of interest and frustration for me, as I struggle to find that balance for my own wholeness – the patterns of eating and being that will allow me to be the fullest and most natural expression of my healthy self (Inanna had a wonderful recent post about this very issue), that will assist me in being aware of myself, my spirituality and my relationships in the world. Like my spiritual journey, my journey to radical wholeness, to ethical eating and personal balance, is a lifelong process.

But I feel myself digressing…the point being that in reading this book, I was made aware of a piece of deliciously fabulous Good News. It seems that Paul Stamets, a mycologist and mushroom-obsessive of no small means, has been developing experiments with our delightful fungi cousins that point to the possibility of allowing mushrooms to help us clean up toxic wastes (it would appear that the process in no way harms the mushrooms, which are non-toxic and edible at the end of the process).

Thus, not only are our mushroom sisters and brothers miraculous in their very being, but they also may contain one of the many holy delicious secrets for bringing us back to holistic awareness and living in right relationship with our bone-beloved Mother. I am in awe of thier magnificence.

Therefore today I take as my amulet the crafty mycelium and the god living in the fungi, thanking them deeply for their Work – hoping only to live up to their example. To perform this amazing alchemy of taking the Rot and turning it into Wealth.  Of taking the despair and mixing it with joy to make Good News in the world.  So may it be.