Autumning and the Fruiting of the Underworld… What our mycorelatives can teach us about what lies beneath our surface”
As Summer yields itself to the transformative process of Autumn, the mycological world makes its omnipresence known by emerging from the soil into our world -what wisdom is here for us all?
Autumning. Yes. I am creating a new word.
Much used as a verb in the same way as “wintering”, as introduced to us by author Katherine May in her book, Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times; we can understand “autumning” as a metaphor for the embodied human experience of a seasonal ecological process.
And I know what you’re going to ask: “Marika, how do we ‘autumn’?”
I’ll admit, the answer is something I am currently in the process of exploring myself, but perhaps we can look to our mycorelatives for some guidance…
“Wetland in Autumn” by Teruhide Tomori at the Midagahara wetland, Tateyama-machi, Toyama pref. Chubu-Sangaku National Park.
Autumn - the Shepherd between Seasonal Binaries
The liminality of Autumn is no secret, and more specifically - the mysterious portal of October into November.
I feel that one of the reasons this time feels so otherworldly is that it is the transition between the seasonal binaries of Summer and Winter. Both Summer & Winter can have a bit of resistance to handing themselves off to one another, and it is the transitional times of Autumn and Spring that help shepherd these seasonal bodies from one form to the next. And as Spring is often understood as the time for rebirth and new beginnings, Autumn has long since been regarded as a time in which Life itself surrenders to the inevitable process of Death.
There are significant lessons to integrate from all organisms during this time. The shedding of leaves on deciduous trees. The fullness and celebration of the final harvests of the growing season. And my favorite, the return of the fall salmon runs into their natal streams, whereupon they spawn (lay their eggs and fertilize them) and then die. I have long since understood the salmon’s return as a metaphor for spirits’ journey to the afterlife, and this is marked particularly significant to me as I have lost my father, grandmother, and uncle in the month of October (October 15th, 20th, and 4th respectively) - during the height of salmon spawning season. But perhaps the wisdom of the salmon return warrants a different essay…
While salmon use the liminality of Fall to send their relatives home to the Spirit World, our mycorelatives use it as an opportunity to cross the threshold from the Underworld into the Middle World… our world - the surface.
The carcass of a male Chum salmon, Oncorhynchus keta, lying on the bank of the Skykomish River after spawning. Wild Chum salmon are critically endangered on the Skykomish River. Its carcass, and the millions of other salmon carcasses that return to their natal streams & rivers, will provide invaluable nutrients for the forests and river valleys for generations to come. Fall 2023.
Mycorelatives and the Fruiting of the Underworld
Late summer for me necessitated a hermitic-like state in order to effectively navigate what life has been throwing at me. As Autumn has progressed, I’ve found myself emerging from my own personal underworld and touching in with my community. A pattern that I’ve observed among many people in my life is the shared experience of feeling confronted with the skeletons in their closet (no Halloween puns intended). People navigating grief that was thought to be long since processed, old insecurities and wounds bubbling their way to the surface, or the emerging of emotional and social patterns that were once seen as being dormant.
Simultaneously, I have found myself attuning my human-as-animal senses to the magical world of mushrooms. I couldn’t help but begin making a connection…
Here in the Pacific Northwest,
I am absolutely blessed to live in one of the most mycologically diverse areas of the country. Frequent and intense precipitation paired with some of the nation’s last remaining old growth forests provide fertile ground for our fungal friends. And while we see mushrooms throughout the year, Autumn is the most anticipated homecoming that mycology nerds, culinary enthusiasts, wildcrafters and woodsmen across the region spend their entire year waiting for.
Weavers of the Underworld
Perhaps there is no member of the necrobiome community more responsible for stitching the webs of connection beneath the surface more than mycelium. With their white, thread-like tendrils, mycelium are the threshold organisms that bind the living to the dead, reminding us that Life itself is not a binary between the two, but rather a thick fabric, Life and Afterlife inextricably interwoven. Everything on the spectrum between Life and Death. Here is an excerpt taken from one of my pieces, “Burn Morel Mushrooms - the Psychopomp”:
“… but we do not walk into the spirit realm alone, whether we are tree, honeybee, or chipmunk, elk or cougar, trillium or moss...
the ferryman moves us lovingly across the river of Life to the otherside, cell by cell as our vessel decomposes… balance being restored here where once we dwelled, breathed, and loved.
metabolization, digestion, absorption - it is all alchemy. and mycelium the alchemist.
a symphony of tendrils transmuting and transforming one form of life to the next. like they have for nearly 800 million years.
they know our bodies, and every single cell and atom that comprises them more than our mothers, our fathers, our lovers, ourselves.
burn morels - the psychopomp”.
*You can read more of this particular piece in the collaborative zine, Bodies of Land Issue #002: Threads of Connection Interwoven in the Earth.
Mushrooms emerge as a reminder that the Underworld is omnipresent - that hidden beneath our feet, escaping human contemplation or acknowledgment, is in fact an infinitely vast network of life and death in a constant state of happening. A majority of a mushroom’s life is spent deep in the soil or in the flesh of rotting trees,
and when the conditions are right, a fruiting body is produced (what we colloquially refer to as a mushroom).
Thus they remind us:
The Underworld exists.
Mycelium.
Sometimes mushrooms present themselves readily, such as the charismatic fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), which can often be found in urban areas; and sometimes mushrooms will only reveal themselves to those who specifically seek them out… though even still they may elude the pursuant. All plants & organisms are rather mysterious in this way. I can’t count the number of times I’ve stepped foot into the forest in search of chanterelles, thinking “This is the day!”, only to return to my car with a handful of pictures of other mushrooms, that I can’t eat 😆
Similarly, sometimes our past gives us no choice but to be confronted with it. In fact, its return is…
(continued in Substack)
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