Half a Fairy Ring

Last week’s blogpost included a video in which the speaker suggested that the forest is a blueprint for teaching us how to get along together.  As I hiked through a forest this past weekend, I was thinking about that statement.  I waited for inspiration to arrive from the trees and the forest floor.  I thought about the diversity that I saw all around me.  There were hardwoods and softwoods, wild flowers and shrubs.  I thought about how they all found their niches, their space in the canopy or in and around the trees.  I thought about how they supported each other and provided food and shelter for the forest animals that in turn spread seeds and fertilized the soil.

Eventually, we came to a cedar grove which is one of my favourite places to spend time.  I stopped to look at it and felt immediately invited in.  Very little grows on the forest floor beneath cedars so the path was open and easy.  I wandered through the family groupings of trunks and past some very large grandmother trees.  The light filtered down through the branches onto the ground, all rusty brown from the dead cedar needles.

Suddenly, something orange caught my eye.  Bending over, I found a colony of bright orange mushrooms growing in a line.  Then beside them, I discovered a line of blood red mushrooms following the same line.  Then there was a patch of white lacy fungus still in the same line and then beige mushrooms.  Stepping back, I could see that they formed an arc that looked like half of a circle.  Immediately, I thought of the fairy rings of European legends where fairies dance within a circle of mushrooms.  My mother used to talk about fairies at the bottom of the garden and this ancient belief that Roman enforced Christianity never quite managed to squelch still captured my imagination.  The fairy rings were sacred places where mortals shouldn’t intrude according to legend.  This was only half a circle though.  But somehow it did feel kind of magical to see so many different fungi growing in an arc.

My partner felt that likely, the fungi were growing out of a dead and rotting cedar root that curved.  I tried to picture the root deep under the earth and all the fungal networks there as well.  Which tree did it come from?  It’s very interesting to cast one’s imagination deep into the earth. I wondered if this was part of the forest blueprint and what it was telling me. 

Walking on, I came across a large boulder covered in bright green moss.  It was just the right height to sit on and I greeted this ancient grandmother as I sat down.  I wondered what she - since she'd been around for a very long time- might know about the blueprint and what the mushrooms had to teach me.  Straight away an idea popped into my head.  “Don’t forget about hidden resources.”  

The dead and buried root had become a resource for the mushrooms and they were transforming its life into another form.  Their networks would let the trees communicate underground and share resources as well.  What I could see above the surface was minuscule compared to what was below.

As I continued to walk I thought about all the resources that seem to be invisible in our world such as the wisdom of elders, the insights of women that are often ignored, and the brilliance of children.  So often, only the loudest, most competitive voices are heard and the information they share is the same old story of scarcity, might over right and greed.  The forest blueprint was showing me that the hidden resources and voices were important to pay attention to.  That they could give life and voice to something magical, to something new.