Off The Grid: Making a hobby of meditating on the marvelous

Crouched upon the forest floor, palms sinking into the luminescent green carpet of moss, breathing in the thick sweetness of decay, one questions if it smells the same as fertility. In these last summer and first autumn days, it seems that both parts of the life cycle are happening simultaneously, like a two-sided tarot card.

I crouched on the carpeted soil beneath the hemlocks. Dappled morning light trickled over me. The rush and babble of Salmo Creek echoed through the trunks of towering tree as the heave and swell of the moss over rotting stumps and undulating landscape gave the scene a feel of the sea. It’s less amniotic here, more embryonic. Everything close to the ground is tiny, dense and miraculous.

But most fascinating of all, most primordial and diverse, mysterious and funky and potentially deadly, are the mushrooms.

Neither plant nor animal, the mushroom commands its own kingdom in a natural world existing of only four: Protista, Animalia, Plantae and Fungi. Many of us have little interaction with them aside from a pizza topping, although their growing (or resurgent) trend in the therapeutic realm has garnered them more attention as of late.

I have long placed mushroom hunters and birdwatchers in the category of “things retired people do” before e-bikes and “The Golden Bachelor” made aging appear more cool. What I am beginning to think, in a perhaps biased observation as one not immune to the impacts of aging, is that observation itself is the pastime of those of us recovering from the narcissism and egocentrism of youth.

It’s an argument for all of us to take up a hobby of the macroscopic, a meditation on marvelous. When we slow down enough to see it, the term “humbling” doesn’t even come close. Maybe this is why I am drawn again and again into nature to seek any number of cures for any number of my ailments, be they spiritual, environmental or otherwise.

On this particular day, I crawled around on the rich soil of damp undergrowth fascinated by fungi, trod along the canyon trail looking for leftover berries, winced and groaned as I navigated an impossibly cold creek or two, then climbed out of the shaded and secretive canopy into a world that required a broader lens. The glistening mushroom caps gave way to crisp breezes and summer-bleached slopes.

The bear grass had blossomed, it stalks now dried out, toppled and trampled by weather and critters. The berry bushes were shades of brown, red and purple where the bears have not munched them to twigs. The dirt and mud smelled metallic, like minerals once heated but now cooling in the longer nights. The flowers had gone to seed. A light frost or two had subdued the late bloomers.

In the high country, sun and snow have turned the trees into the bones of a once-forest. Their silver white trunks twist into the blue heavens as if reaching for a new soul. Is this the procession of life, from the womb-like promise of brookside lush to the scrappy remnants of wind-worn peaks? If so, I ponder, where do I find myself in this ceaseless of transitions?

Presently, on a ridge where my horizon has shifted from the glistening caps of indigo mushrooms to the jagged line of the distant Selkirks. A whitish owl swoops over me, around dark spears of pine tops, then overhead again. I have no idea what kind it is. I determine that birdwatching is a worthy pastime and make note to find a book on the subject. I suppose it doesn’t much matter what we observe, so long as we pause to contemplate it its wonder.

I don’t know that maturity is an inevitable side effect of time spent on Earth, but some days I am at least hopeful.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammimarie@gmail.com