Making Meditation: Mushrooms & Mycelium

A series where handcrafts meet poetry in a gentle lil way.

Jun 21, 2023

The Making of “Making Meditations”

Either you already know or will soon come to realize that the world of craft and the handmade obsesses my attention like a summer porchlight bewitches moths. While I’m captivated by the crafts themselves—the history, the artisans, the practices, the gorgeous final artifacts—I’m far more compelled by how the act of shaping, in turn, shapes us.

For, oh, I don’t know, all of human history, making things with our hands was as essential to our survival as food, water, and shelter—not to mention a likely source of deep joy and abiding purpose. Some philosophers have suggested that it might be more accurate to refer to our species as Homo faber (Man the Maker) rather than Homo sapiens (Man the Wise), a title on which our fancy opposable thumbs have had a rather dubious and tenuous grasp to begin with...

The paradigm shift that has relegated the handmade to the realm of hobby and pastime is an extremely recent one, and it raises enormous questions about our understanding of ourselves, our creativity, and our capacity for making change.

These are questions I don’t often hear asked, even in thoughtful circles. These are questions I plan to wrestle with in future newsletters like an Old Testament angel, so grab some popcorn and get psyched for that!

I was chatting with my friend recently who is a metalsmith and jewelry designer (hey, Madeline!). She asked me if I had been keeping up my craft practice alongside my writing practice. And I had to admit, more to myself than to her, that I hadn’t. All the typical excuses: only so many hours in the day, writing is freakishly time consuming for me, the crafts can feel frivolous when I don’t have my head on straight. She gently reminded me that if I plan to write about how these practices transform people, I’d need to let them do their work on me.

So, because craft is not only my therapy but an avenue to mindfulness and one of my favorite lenses on the world—and because the Internet could use more gentle content—I offer Making Meditations: a simple record of a craft in progress, the thoughts it stirs, and a piece of writing that gives me an aesthetic shiver of delight.

Apologies in advance that cinematography is not among my skillset. But making a million french knots? I got you covered there…

The full text of “Mushrooms” by Paige Quiñones can be found here.
Music is “Paper Whales” by Alan Gogoll.
Amanita design by Lemon Pepper Studio.

I can’t think of the last thing I made that wasn’t in some way a representation of a plant or animal. By replicating their forms, I’m offered a new avenue of attention. “Attention,” Simone Weil said, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” That has never felt more true than now, when attention is a commodity in short supply.

She also said: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

If that is true, craft is my church. And I’m a bit of a zealot.

I knew Amanita mushrooms had little flecks of white on their caps. But it wasn’t until I was stitching one that I thought to look at the size and shape of these spots, to wonder how they got there.

They are fragments from the universal veil that encloses the growing mushroom like an egg before its candybright cap bursts like a quiet firework out of the leaf litter. How, I wondered as I stitched ecru knots onto my replica of a mushroom cap, do I carry with me the vestiges of ways I once protected myself? What pale spangle of old defenses still clings?

Embroidery floss is typically made of six strands that can be separated, and I worked most of the mushroom in single strands. It is slow, deliberate work. Countless mushrooms could have fruited from the soil and died in the time it took me to complete my stitched Amanita. It always takes me a while to learn to see with my hands, to have the needle emerge where I intend it to for each stitch.

Every time the sharp tip found its blind way through the back of the fabric, I thought of the gentle insistence of mycelium. This fungal network is the seamstress of the soil, threading ghostly hyphae through the darkness beneath our feet.

Forest ecologist Dr. Suzanne Simmard coined the term “Wood Wide Web” to describe this lattice of connection, this fretwork for communication and sustenance. Tress from different species, her research shows, can share nutrients and information through this elaborate network and offer the tireless sewists of the fungal kingdom the sugary spoils of their photosynthesis in return.

In the lightless underland, fungi endlessly stitch the world together. It’s easy to see in the well-lit world all that is torn, all that is in desperate need of repair. This small embroidery is a practice, a miniature act of faith, a reminder of the thousand tiny gestures - often obscured or unnoticed - that underpin a community of connection: the slow, meaningful work of care.

Speaking of slow…the field of moss wasn’t part of the original design, but what *isn’t* better with moss? The steady patience required by all those french knots offers me a window into “moss mind.” Moss mind is a space of unhurried but inexorable transformation. Moss mind trusts the inherent wisdom in things to know the time they need to grow. Moss mind is fundamentally anticapitalist.

I’m a big fan of moss mind.

Other Voices

Since “What Kind of Magpie” flits from topic to topic, I’ve added this section for people wanting to take a deeper dive within the Substack ecosystem on the ideas discussed in this post.

Make Me Good Soil

- OK, listen: if you’re vibing on the combination of poetry and mushrooms and you DON’T know Sophie Strand’s work yet, holy moly are you in for a treat. Reading her writing is like cocooning up in a soft blanket spun of mycelium and spidersilk. You’re welcome.

Here for the poetry? Be sure to check out the unparalleled

Poetry Unbound

and

Poetry Today

. You cannot have too much poetry in your life. Glut yourself with abandon.

Want to learn more about foraging? Be sure to check out

Practical Self Reliance

and

The Forager - Wild Food & Nature Lovers

And if you’re just in the mood for a massively entertaining tale of morel hunting, don’t miss “The Not-So-Magic Mushrooms” from

Exploding Unicorn by James Breakwell