Messages from Mycelia

| by cee-cee manrique |

I don’t know what the fungi know. What they make and take of us.

I am a queer, trans mushroom farmer and the steward of two acres of land in windy west Wales. Living on the land and tending to mycelia has profoundly impacted me. The mycelia I interact with, cultivated and wild, have been some of my closest guides through this personal change of season. Gradually, I am unfurling into my trans self, gently guided by these fungal creatures and fellow beings. I write in thanks to them.

Message #1: Naming

As my given name came to feel like a gift that I had outgrown and no longer related to, I began to search for a new name to claim. As I carried out my menial tasks on the mushroom farm, tending to the mycelia, moving them about in buckets and checking for contamination, inoculating and cleaning, harvesting; I would spend time thinking about what I wanted to call myself. It was right in front of me the whole time. I just hadn’t yet seen them, as is often the way with the fungi. Mycelia, ‘celia, cee-cee.

With this new name — plural, feminine, soft, mellifluous, gifted by the fungi — I feel so much more able to walk as myself in the world and to seek connection with my kin, human and more-than. If we pay close enough attention to mycelia, they have such insights to offer up, silent gifts that can resonate as melodies in the songs we sing to ourselves on woodland walks or in the shower.

Message #2: Decomposing

The mushrooms we cultivate on our farm are primary decomposers. Their work is alchemic. We see it each autumn through our shiitake logs, for example. After two or three years, the shiitake mycelium has woven its way through the hardwood logs, gradually transmuting the woodiness to pulp and pith. Where before, chainsaws were needed to cut through the oak and beech logs, they crumble in our hands as a result and this hummus-like form is what we then use to line our beds from which we grow our vegetables. The hyphae — the filaments that make up a mycelial network — have scoured the heft and turned the tree back toward soil.

The fungi show us that we can carefully lay down the parts of ourselves we are done with, as offerings to the old soils, to become humic substances or to be forgotten as sediment and fossil, feeding the future in their silence. It is in the decay that we are presented with such fruitful space for recomposition, for possibility.

Sometimes on my walks across the land I seek out the hollows in trees, wrought by the fungal hyphae. I’ll climb up onto the tall banks or a low-slung branch to peek my head over, hoping to not startle an owl. In these crevices what I tend to find are tiny gardens, shielded from the elements, deeply furtive, where beetles watch over the life of a tiny mushroom - a brief monument to the creative force of decay.

Image credit: Heather Birnie x Landworkers Alliance 

Message #3: Cultivating

When I was disabled by long covid, I felt so painfully a sense of rotting as I lay cocooned in a touring caravan on the land my partner and I tend to. I was bed-bound for about two years. During that time of decomposition, as my body withered, I clung desperately to the things I knew of myself. I had to let go of the long walks, regular exercise, and work as a mushroom farmer, along with so many other loves.

Now, as I gradually recover, I have been able to return to the mycelia on our farm. There is something about cultivating fungi that has made it easier for me to imagine their wild kin. Often, as I walk around the land and in the countryside I visualise myself tending to the fungi that are all around us, acknowledging the wild mycelia though I can’t see them. I have come to understand this as an act of faith and in that an inclination to nurture our wild counterparts.

Though I may look the same in my movements, I have softened my step as a result. If I want to turn a leaf about, I try to imagine that there might well be a mycelial tendril that is also holding onto it, ever so softly pulling it back toward soil. In these moments, I feel uniquely connected to the landscape, tapped into a mycelial network, albeit briefly. It is in our cultivated softness that we can tend to mycelia. If we treat our landscapes gently as we move through them, if we can apply a reverence to the land, it has boundless potential to cultivate us too.

On our walks, especially now, we might be lucky to find the mushrooms we seek. The image of a mushroom that so many of us recognise is in actuality just one phase. This stunning display of fruit, surprising in its suddenness, is the result of quiet, cryptic work that we cannot see. It is very appealing to reduce the fungus to the mushroom cap but in the world of mycelia these are known only as its reproductive parts.

My trans siblings will be all-too-familiar with this experience of shrinking, of reducing. Too often the maybe painful, indescribably beautiful, invisible and generative and creative work of producing our gender — of becoming ourselves — is overlooked. That sacred process of generative decay, of breaking down the rigid, woody edifice of prescribed gender, of probing and exploration and expansive recomposition is trampled over in disbelief. Sometimes people can only see the mushroom, but mycelium teaches us that we are so much more complex than the cap we present to the world.

Message #4: Becoming

Through the messages of mycelia I have learnt that we must be benign creatures to each other, gentle in our witnessing. Transition is not a solitary thing, but a communal undertaking. Though much of the process might be personal, private even, to me it has been the witnessing of others that has affirmed my transition most. Witnessed by the jackdaws, yes, and the other creatures too, in their silence and their ways that I cannot really fathom; but also by my human siblings, friends, family and strangers. We are all, ultimately, headed toward the sweet release of the fungi. Wouldn’t it be warmer to think that when the inevitable decay takes hold, that we can be distributed back across the soil horizons in a state of mycelial kinship? 

The fungi usher in the quieter seasons with their slow evolution. In the spaces they open up we can find fruitful ground for transitions, whether gender-related or otherwise. Perhaps this is the most resounding message of all — that we must open up spaces too, in which we can commune, in our continual states of becoming.

Image credit: Heather Birnie x Landworkers Alliance 

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