Political Lessons from the Rotting Ones
The weather was quite wet in Portland the first weekend of November, and an enormous array of oversized mushrooms sprang up in the dirt strip along the sidewalk outside the house where I was staying.
I noticed them again the morning after Election Day. Some had grown too soggy and were smooshed back into the leaves and mulch, maybe by my own footsteps. Others were bending over, bowed by their own weight. And new ones were beginning to expose their heads to the dim light of day.
And I thought: if I was looking for a metaphor at this moment, it has been gifted to me. Always in the time of the fall, the mushroom is a potent image, whispering reminders that from the rot of the current season, many things will grow.
Some will flare up, solid stem and meaty cap, only to disappear a day later. Some will look tantalizing and be deadly poisonous. Some we know are threats and will squash them back down almost without thinking, while others have their strength in a lasting shadow web of filaments we don’t always readily perceive.
Some will linger, and smell dreadful. But others, being born of the earth—even the rot of the earth—will thus smell like the earth, and prove nourishing. A keen eye, discernment, and even study may be needed to see these. Yet they are there. And some will be delicious and others medicinal and some, of course, will be magical.
In the plentiful decay of November, the mud dark and the color draining from the trees, the mushrooms come. Whether they come only for themselves or for the sake of helping whole new forests spring into being depends on many factors—human action, our action, among those.
As we see what begins to grow in the decomposing muck of American democracy, let us not believe that only poisonous outcomes are possible. Let us remember the mushroom, and train ourselves to see and protect the bits of goodness growing side by side in the autumn shadows, that food and medicine both may be had in the coming times.
Thanks for reading Unsettling.
Until next time,
Meg