The Force That Causes Mushrooms to Push Up From the Earth Overnight

The Moon and Venus. August 2021.

Of all mushrooms commonly consumed, oyster mushrooms in the genus Pleurotus stand out as exceptional allies for improving human and environmental health. These mushrooms enjoy a terrific reputation as the easiest to cultivate, richly nutritious and medicinally supportive.

- Paul Stamets

So it’s the end of August and at eighty-one degrees last night felt wonderful because usually August is an atmosphere I have to survive but there seems to be fresh fruit and veggies growing everywhere around us right now which is also wonderful like the album “Water Memory” by Emily A. Sprague that I’ve been listening to non-stop for a couple of weeks and I love its ambient atmosphere that is very distinct from the Circle Jerks song “Wonderful” which—does any generation understand irony like Gen X understands irony—oddly isn’t one of their more ironic tunes but still the juxtaposition of their west coast punk rock music set to the words, “Be nice, say thank you, please once in a while. It’s a beautiful world we live in, give your neighbor a smile” maintains the ironic gesture unlike how many old languages do not use irony at all and are wonderful in their almost onomatopoeic pronunciations like the word Puhpohwee from the Anisinaabe people that J read to me the other night from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass”:

My first taste of the missing language was the word Puhpohwee on my tongue. I stumbled upon it in a book by the Anishinaabe botanist Keewaydinoquay, in the traditional uses of fungi by our people. Puhpohwee, she explained, translates as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.”

Puhpohwee. The word, the mysterious forces of nature, that someone thought to name it, fills me with wonder.

These things too inspired me recently:

• The mathematics of mind-time. The URL for this article explains it best: consciousness is not a thing but a process of inference. Interesting to read how a physicist/psychologist approaches the idea of consciousness.

• Goal Setting Is a Hamster Wheel. Learn to Set Systems Instead. - “What that means is that you exist in a failure state for a long time until you reach that goal.” - Adam Alter with Big Think. Interesting approach to create systems toward a thing rather than have the thing be the goal.

• Darshan by Reena Esmail played by Vibha Janakiraman, violin. I heard this edition of the radio program “From the Top” back in December and the beauty of this tune stays with me. It begins at 51 seconds into the episode.

• Darshan by Reena Esmail. I love how Reena describes her approach to creating “Darshan” with violinist Vijay Gupta. In the audio guide on her website she literally sings and explains the underlying raga that makes the melody and how to play the work. Darshan means “seeing” in Hindi.

• The Unexpected Beauty of COVID Hair. “The pandemic obliged—or enabled—many women to go gray. They’re still reckoning with the transformation.” Click for the amazing photography alone, but the stories are fascinating too.