I’ve been adding and subtracting from the essay below for awhile now. It’s time to let it fly, a piece that does not fit with what I usually write on this blog. On closer scrutiny, there is no usually to this blog, so it will find room. Thanks for reading. GK
Damn it. You and I, we came to an agreement years ago.
I didn’t begrudge your decision, knew it was a possibility, yes, but didn’t hold it against you. I went about my business for more than a decade accepting that individuals are allowed to make that choice. Then you decided it was the right fit for you, and I had no more concern than if you were trying on your last pair of pants.
Yes, there were consequences, especially for those who had to clean up your mess. And yet, after the initial grief and anger and finally spreading you in a favorite trout stream, your death represented no more than loss, a missing of what had been there. Your leaving wasn’t aggravated by your method.
I steadied myself by defending you and others, and your right to decide how to die. Lately, though, I’ve been stumbling, thrown out of balance by ideas that are making me think that your explanations for killing yourself were based on bad data, or, at least, an outdated story.
Those weeks we spent together in the early summer of ’07, months before you died. Remember those? We’d go outside in the dark, soak ourselves in starlight. The Bitterroot Mountains to the west shouldered Arcurtus and the rest of the Bootes constellation. The forest fire smoke had not reached us yet. Nights remained clear, so when we looked up, the Milky Way split the Bitterroot Valley sky, spilling out from south to north. Those cardinal directions were too small to contain our galaxy, so you, fighting a virulent infection, nearing seventy-eight years old, and wearing a zippered fleece jacket against the night chill of the Rocky Mountain air, would tilt your head back and whisper to yourself: We are infinitesimally small.
That was as close to spiritual as I recall you ever acting. You were a one-man congregation praying on the back porch, nearing a mystical explanation about why dying was nothing to fear. You kept repeating your psalm: We are small, alone beings on a tiny planet; we shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge when our time is over.
Pain explained some of the reason why you wanted out. You used injury and frustration as reasons, as well. A bacterial infection starting in the left knee and spreading, inexorably growing. In the end, they were all reason enough.
You rejected amputation. You put off another move to New England. Individuals have a duty to take care of themselves, you told me repeatedly.
To you, we were, all of us, alone, even when surrounded by concerned and caring family. That was your story as you told it, and ended it. It was my work to listen to your explanation and accept it — my job as a son who wanted to honor a decision.
I kept telling the same story over the years: I hated the outcome, supported your choice. Our stories change, though, as we nose about for improved meaning in our lives. Mine did last summer, when it rained nearly every day in July. Informed by fungi, tree roots, and a Beat Generation religious thinker, I tell a new story, one I wish I could have told you under those dark Bitterroot skies. As a scientist, you would appreciate the idea. New evidence has been unearthed under our feet; the fungus and the trees, tied to each other in ways few of us understood a decade ago, are telling us tales of reciprocity and connection that seem almost fanciful. Trees that look alone above ground are anything but when examined below. The trees we thought separate, instead, live as one community, one where saplings and stumps are kept well by giant mothers sharing their surplus sugar generated by photosynthesis.
The trees give to each other using a symbiotic contract with fungi, which are everywhere underground, their roots running complex systems of give-and-take between plants and trees that have their own systems of common defense and generous welfare programs for feeding the needy. The idea that there is connection everywhere one digs, networking so complicated that evidence suggests single trees are rooted to hundreds of others, makes me think we have been telling themselves the wrong story, certainly a long-held misinterpretation. Apply a little imagination, squint a little, you see the deep ties underground between trees and fungi are more than a new idea. They’re telling a new story in the forest duff.
You needn’t have thought yourself so alone.
It’s difficult to say when an idea starts to take hold. I first heard the phrase mycorrhizal network more than five years ago in relation to my summer vegetable garden. Don’t rototill the soil, my friend suggested. You’ll destroy the mycorrhizae.
The what? I asked him for an explanation; he offered something fuzzy like, The invisible connections underground.
Again, the what? It sounded like a spirit world was living in my garden soil and if I dared rototill the dirt, that act would be like carpet bombing heaven, taking out winged angels with the blasts. I didn’t want to exterminate any angels in my dirt. Somehow, I knew it would be bad for my tomatoes.
So, I started reading about fungi. That led me to choosing books about trees and forests. You know the texts: The Secret Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben and articles by Suzanne Simard, who went on to write Finding the Mother Tree.
These ideas of trees as community, family, even friends affected the way I walked by beeches and maples and oaks, altered for a while the way I thought about cutting back saplings in my yard. Yet, deep down, nothing changed; the idea dried and died as an animating force. Trees forming community by communicating through their roots, and off-gassing ethylene to warn each other of enemies, became an abstraction, one among many competing ideas.
I received another chance at accepting the reality of this world-under-my-feet idea last summer. I thank the rains. Nearly every July day in New England, it poured or misted or drizzled, making what is normally a wet season (we get most of our precipitation in the summer, not the winter) into a moldy, moist, dripping one. Perfect fungi climate.
On most hikes I took on the New England Trail, linking suburban Connecticut to the mountains of New Hampshire, I spotted a new mushroom. I started learning the basics: mushrooms, like the lawn-chair-sized Berkeley’s Polypore I found in July, are the fruit of the fungi, like the apples of the apple tree, the pear of the pear tree. Most of the living mass of the fungi, the roots, or mycelia, are hidden underground or in downed logs.
Most of us complained of the rot and soggy soil, even farmers yelled no mas at the approach of another storm front. Some folks, though, reveled in the summer rains. They put on hats, took their phones on hikes and returned with photos of slimy fruit, hooded fruit, colonies of orange or spotted fruit hidden behind rotting logs. They posted pictures of fungi fruiting everywhere. Their unstated reaction to our summer of and fungi and mold: You can complain about the weather or get on your hands and knees and look.
I was like a rotting log inoculated with spores when my brother the botanist called to catch up.
It’s not out of the ordinary that my brother would introduce fungi and their relationships with tree roots — these are the mysterious mycorrhizae — to our sometimes lengthy, always irregular, phone calls. He’s curious and has his intellectual finger in many pots, so I’m used to him going on about matters above and below ground. This time, though, our chat about mycelium — the living root mass comprised of searching, reaching tentacle-like hyphae underground — kept me occupied for days afterwards. Something odd had happened as we talked.
I lingered in my lounge chair and we ended the call, and the longer I remained the more I swore I had been talking with my father, or that the three of us had been chatting and we were all in the Bitterroots sharing about mycorrhizal connection while he was trying to work out the idea of dying alone as a tiny mote in the Milky Way galaxy.
Don’t you see? The fungi and the trees roots with which they connect can provide an alternate story for folks who feel cut off, separate; those fungi and trees have a way of being that might be instructive if you look. End your life early if you must, but understand all the possibilities.
Yes, you have to die. You have to let go and let wither the long-standing way of thinking that is irascible and tenacious and wrapped up with the idea that somehow you and I are fundamentally different than fungi, because we can conceive the idea of being separate from trees or fungi.
Look, I have spent my life considering myself special because I have a consciousness that can hold its self separate from the rest of my being. And that’s killing me — certainly it makes life so unbearable at times I wonder what it would be like to not be here.
I guess I could ask you.
Our father, like so many 20th Century dads, handed my brother and I, a template for how to see the world and act on its stage. These passed-on frameworks endure, no matter how often we think we replace them, jettison them, stomp on them. Scientist, atheist, materialist — he honored, above all, his own intellect. Our father was curious, driven, and even creative; he believed in himself, in his ability to solve problems without help. (As a kid, I remember him spending most of one weekend under the kitchen sink, refusing to hire a plumber, a tradesperson he could not imagine more capable at repairing a leak than he was.) As a scientist in the mid-to-late-20th Century, he could hardly have been anything else: rational, material, and independent. Alone.
I embraced that doctrine with zeal, adopting the faith and belief of the man-of-the-world going it alone. As a teen-ager, my heroes were trappers and explorers, men like John Colter, who left the Lewis and Clark expedition when it was returning east because he wanted to live in the Rocky Mountains alone, rather than return to St. Louis. (If you’ve spent summers in St. Louis, you’d understand his point.)
I never made it work, living as trapper in the wild in the 21st Century. Yet, the notion of going it alone, surviving in my own imaginary cabin in the mountains, persists. It’s a bad idea that has remade itself to fit my 2022 life.
If fungi could talk (my guess is that they do, though in a way I cannot understand), I imagine they would tell me that’s the sort of thinking that must be eliminated, which, of course, makes me think of my favorite monk.
Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast writes about a mid-life death as a way to keep living. He imagines the death of being separate in the world, the death of considering yourself special, the death of the idea that your human consciousness sanctifies you.
You see, you’re not so much a tiny, alone mote as part of something larger. Imagine yourself not as one but as part of something like mycelium linking with trees, life as a network that has less to do with a you and a me, more to do with an interwoven us that is hard to fathom.
Because he said it simply and clearly, you should hear it straight from Steindl-Rast: “But our most important death has to do with dying to our independence, as individuals, and so coming to life as persons in our interdependence. We find this terribly difficult, because we always want to retain our independence, the feeling that ‘I don’t owe anybody anything.’”
It’s not lost on me that it’s safer to dream about the possibility of undoing an unalterable suicide rather than changing a few things about the way I go about dealing with my own independence. I best get on with doing what I wish I could have told my dad: When feeling the most fragile in your separate bag of skin holding some brains and bones, try spiritually standing with the underground fungi.
This project of aligning myself with the network of life beyond me, what the philosopher Alan Watts called the Big IT, seems simple enough. Somehow, though, I regularly fail at it. Not unexpected, according to Watts.
It’s like seeing a group of people at a party, folks you know who would change your life, then, while walking over to introduce yourself, they disappear. You’re left with you — again.
This disappearing group at the party, they have one rule: forget your self to join us. When I clear my thinking, ready myself for this change, I inevitably screw it up again; I’m ineffective at even pretending I have no self that is separate from my body or the groundhog eating my garden greens, too fearful of losing what many of us have always considered the apotheosis of being male in America — our independence.
Watts, who gained fame in the 1950s and ‘60s as an interpreter of Eastern religions to western audiences, and was especially popular among the Beat poets, wrote about this scenario. Watt would have called my idea of looking to fungi as a metaphor for escaping our toxic independence a bit foolhardy. He would have said my scheme was like trying to catch a hiding fugitive by sneaking up on him while banging a drum. A project designed to fail.
There was a time when young Christians took to wearing WWJD on rubber bracelets around their wrists. What Would Jesus Do — a reminder to those Christians to pattern their decisions after the moral guidance of Jesus.
I can’t give my dad a LLTF bracelet. He can no longer Live Like The Forest. Maybe living like the forest isn’t any kind of real answer either. It does, though, offer possibility, some relational mystery that we are not equipped yet to understand. Imagine there is a kind of invisible mycelium between us all — humans, copperheads, redbuds, all — filaments binding us in a way that I wonder if my dad was searching to understand when he looked up in the sky those summer nights years ago.
I could be banging Watts’ drum on this one. It does seem, though, that fungi have pointed out a simple fact: We humans don’t know everything yet. It could be that there’s a fabulous project in front of us: understanding what fungi, trees, plants, beetles, and bacteria have already figured out.
We know this much. They don’t live alone.
As materialist, my dad did not truck with religious thinkers, but I think he would agree with Steindl-Rast that it’s difficult in this life to “give up independence, and come to life in interdependence, which is the joy of belonging and of being together.”
You needn’t have thought yourself so alone. That’s all I ever wanted you and me to know.
Mr. K's World 