Bless the rainy days That interrupt the careful dance of plans Pushing you into Attention to other lives, other needs, And back to your soul.
Bless the quiet drone Of branches dripping on foggy windows, That make you look out On the familiar, damply rearranged To absorb your stress.
Bless the gift of God Poured out on the righteous and unrighteous To soothe aching roots And prepare the wintering world to rest, Rebuilding its love.
Bless the sunny days That catch your face in their hands and lift it To see in clear light Every texture and color and shadow, Even of your heart.
Bless the blinding blue Of a sky scrubbed clean enough to see through Right up to heaven And reflect incomprehensible depth In each frost crystal.
Bless the gift of God Shined down on the righteous and unrighteous To warm and to fill, Stirring the air to life for all creatures, Under rays of peace.
Image: Delighted Child in Rain, Hamilton County, Tenn., September 2022.
Mushrooms carry an almost unintelligible magic. One minute they’re seemingly not there. The next, after a rain, they have taken over the world—coming up in every shape, size, and color in every corner of forests and neighborhoods. Once they’re out, they seem to disappear almost as quickly, spoiling like the rotting wood or decaying tree roots from which they grow, just at an astonishing speed. Even what we call them hints at wrapping our minds around something just out of reach of full comprehension: toadstools, puffballs, stinkhorns, death caps, fairy rings.
Of course even what we think of as mushrooms, are really just the flashiest part of much larger underground networks. These fruiting bodies (sporocarps) sprout from a tangled mass of threads (hyphae) collectively called the mycelium, which lives on long after the mushroom we see rots. What grows in the dark is the real life of the organism, and nothing visible would exist without it.
Even these types of networks represent only a tiny fraction of the species we call fungi. Mycologists and other scientists are still figuring out ways this mysterious branch of life on earth—no longer thought of as plants like they were, even as recently as my high school biology textbooks, but as a whole kingdom unto themselves—interact with the rest of life.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the way fungal strands embedded in the roots of some nut trees function as an underground superhighway for information, nutrients, and more. These symbiotic mycorrhizae, she says, enable “the fungi to forage for mineral nutrients in the soil and deliver them to the tree in exchange for carbohydrates.” Beyond that, they “may form fungal bridges between individual trees so that all the trees in a forest are connected” transferring nutrients from healthy trees to struggling ones and allowing the trees to co-regulate nut production and set the tempo for the life of the whole forest. “All flourishing is mutual.”
I’m thinking of this wondrous mystery because I’ve witnessed a metaphorical mycorrhizal network among some friends on Instagram this summer, as we share photos of mushrooms we’ve found, writing poetry or other reflections on these tiny miracles, and basking in the joy of creation together at whatever level we’ve dived in to amateur mycology. We didn’t set out individually to create an Internet mushroom cabal, but the manmade mycorrhizae we call algorithms brought a snowballing cascade of vibrant photos into our shared feeds.
Foraging, Collage, and Photograph by K.J. RamseyPost from Amanda Held Opelt
But is it just an algorithm? Though I’ve learned not to underestimate the power social media exercises in our lives, I won’t cede this—the symbiosis of mushrooms popping up simultaneously in Tennessee, North Carolina, Colorado, and Virginia and the call to bask in wonder that my friends and I felt—to some artificial intelligence. If all flourishing is mutual, that is by design. God speaks in beauty as well as words, and calls us to attend to the world for our own good and the good of others. The interconnectedness we experienced over these posts is a gift.
The depth and breadth of our neural networks, as vast and complex as any mycelium and carrying a flow of information that none of us fully comprehend, is also still being researched, continually astonishing us with the web of knowing God has sewn into each of us. Absorbing the delicacy and grandeur of the world around us can attune us to God’s peace. Circulating ever-present reminders of creation can also attune us to each other. Networked loveliness can co-regulate us just as surely as fungi facilitate the health of the forest.
We share wonder with others as a way to stay alive together. Beauty springing forth to be observed by one of us can be shared to nourish others struggling to see the goodness of life at the same time. When one of us is strengthened, that gift is not for us alone, but for the strengthening of others as well. Art—even sharing phone photos of mushrooms on a social platform—is a response to something true and good and beautiful that can’t help but invite others to come and see.
As part of her story, Kimmerer writes of the wonder she uncovered by struggling to recover the Potawatomi language of her people. One of the first words that sparked her desire to find out what was hidden in her then-missing language was puhpowee—which could be translated as “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.” She writes, “As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed….In the three syllables of this new word I could see an entire process of close observation in the damp morning woods, the formulation of a theory for which English has no equivalent.”
The mystery behind this word born of gazing at wonder sticks with me. The same God who pushes forth mushrooms after a rain is working out grace in the hidden places of our lives. The encouragement of new life from old that he nudges me to notice in my backyard or on a hike are worth meditating on. The sunrises and sunsets that paint the world every day are worth staring at and writing poems and prayers about. The glint of light on a fish’s scales or a rainbow in a waterfall or the ripples on a desert dune deserve all the attention we can spare.
The flashes of beauty in this world are as fleeting as the life and death of a mushroom. They’re easy to miss. But they are so frequently given, it’s never too late to look up. I pray I will never stop straining to see or stopping to say “look at this!,” because the wonder that others want to (need to!) see it too will never stop amazing me.
Featured Image: Mushrooms in the golden hour, Hamilton County, Tennessee.
The sun seeps contently across a thousand “heads,” Spits of earth bathed gently by precious light that spreads From the ocean inland down on cornfields, swamps, woods And then, as on command, dawns to wake neighborhoods.
Above false light-rings snuffed by rising of the day, Soft pink cloud-beards, puffed, shine back above the gray About mountain collars transformed by the first rays That hit peaks and hollers to Appalachian blaze.
Here beyond hills glowing, I watch the red-orange ooze Spill down, slipping, slowing, toward misty valley blues, Now casting blades of grass bowed with drops of dew As countless beads of glass making the scene brand new.
Tomorrow they’ll reset and pull it off again, Cycling without regret nature’s unfeigned amen. Each day cries out wonder, sprouting what joy we’ve squirreled. Blessing rends asunder the darkness of the world.
Rodgers and Hammerstein notwithstanding, I’ve always known the hills are alive.
At 14, my family moved from the sandy pines of South Georgia to a high Appalachian town in North Carolina. Our house there, nearly 4,000 feet above sea level, did not have air conditioning. We only missed it a few days each summer. Something in my internal thermostat must have permanently re-set in the years I spent there, leaving me pining for the mountains whenever summer begins to creep into the Tennessee Valley, where I’ve lived since college.
Once the temperature hits the mid-nineties, I often give up and flee to the hills. Seeking refuge in the lush shade of temperate rainforest or ridgeline breezes is a family tradition, though I suppose it hasn’t helped me re-acclimate to the rest of the South. Blessedly, I still live close enough that a 2-hour drive and quick mile hike can take me to another world.
Learning to Look Up
Old-growth cove forests seem designed to lead to self-forgetfulness. I know I can always find rest there leaning on the shoulder of a tulip poplar, rocketing to heaven from a vast fan of creekside roots. Six, maybe eight, feet thick, one hundred seventy-five feet tall, it has carried the weight of the world for five or six hundred years. The propped frame of a passing hiker is no added burden.
The Cherokee called these woods “Nantahala”—roughly translated as “the place of the noonday sun”—because the high valley slopes only let light reach the forest floor for a brief while in the middle of each day. With the thick summer canopy in full flush, it’s not all that bright even then. The understory is not thick, owing to the dark shade, with small shrubs and groundcover gobbling up what light they can, leaving much of the ground open for mushrooms, millipedes, and microbes to slowly work through rotting branches and centuries of leaf-litter.
Though the Cherokees’ original name persists for the National Forest encompassing this area, the U.S. Forest Service selected a particular cove to rename as a memorial to poet Joyce Kilmer, best remembered for an untimely demise in World War I and one particularly sentimental poem (“Trees”) that ends with the line, “only God can make a tree.”
Such divine provenance certainly hasn’t stopped people from trying to make trees. Looking up a bare trunk that punctures through all competing foliage before its first leaf, it is not hard to see cathedral columns of Gothic imagination. Perhaps stone temples bathed in stained-glass light were attempts to recapture the world as it was before it was “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,” as another poet—Gerard Manley Hopkins—phrased it in “God’s Grandeur.”
Death and Rebirth Not many such vaulted glades remain today even under the putatively watchful eye of the USFS. It protects a few wilderness spots like this while managing millions of acres for timber contracts. What becomes of a sacred space when the pillars come down?
At Joyce Kilmer, across the creek from the main grove of outsized poplars, there are scars. A swath of the cove was devastated by the one-two punch of a tornado during the 2011 Southeast “Super-outbreak” and a forest fire during the exceptional drought of 2016. What grows on that slope today bears little resemblance to pre-storm flora. A tangled mass of hydrangea, mountain laurel, loosestrife, blackberry canes, and saplings of maple, birch, hemlock and even the next generation of tulip poplars have rushed into the breach—all interspersed with a handful of older trees that survived the upheaval.
In spite of the temporary overabundance of sunlight and the changes in soil moisture it brings about, this is a forest in recovery. In 2-3 more decades, it will look more like a typical, healthy cove forest again, shading the creek again and allowing the ground and micro-biome to bounce back. Barring other catastrophes, in another 40 or 50 decades, it will be as majestic as its antique neighbors further up the cove are now.
Destruction and Restoration
Just below the summit of Huckleberry Knob—a 5,560’ peak barely 5 miles west of this poplar grove—another story is told in a clutch of 14 Fraser firs. These evergreens (of Christmas tree industry fame), only grow in the wild atop the highest reaches of the Southern Appalachians. What makes this tiny forest stand out is its isolation, a sort of reverse-clearing within acres of grassland.
Huckleberry Knob is one of the fabled “balds” that draw hikers from all over the country for their sweet-smelling wildflower meadows and 360-degree views. Originally, it’s likely that the whole summit was forested with firs and red spruce, like many neighboring peaks to the north and east, but only this patch remains. Why balds exist at all, no one really knows. Most speculate that they were created either by timbering or lightning-sparked wildfires, but ended up being maintained “artificially”—maintained by the Cherokee as sacred sites or berry harvesting centers, later used for summer grazing land by European settlers weary of valley heat.
Today, most are protected by overlapping state, federal, or private land-management entities. Some balds are in various stages of reverting back to forest, the laws of old-field succession operating as predicted. Others are kept in grass by mowing or grazing by lightly-managed herds of semi-wild ponies. Others seem to persist by new natural forces, a shift in soil chemistry and species balance running deep enough to effect a permanent alteration.
In any case, each of these mountaintops is wholly different from its original landscape. Instead of dark, evergreen woods shading out all underbrush, there are prairies of abundance—where strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries invite human and animal foragers to partake. A ring scrub—a sort of high-altitude savanna—often buffers the fields from more dense woods typical of a region receiving 80-100 inches of rainfall each year.
A few hundred miles to the northeast, the balds atop the Allegheny Plateau of West Virginia are referred to as “sods” in the local vernacular. Many of these have better attested origins, the largest a direct result of massive fires following clear-cut logging in the 19th century. Intense heat fueled by heaps of stumps and branches scoured humus down to bedrock. Amid the bare stones, grasses and lowbush blueberries stake a claim, with a few krummholz spruce in damp spots that retain some soil. In October, as the blueberries’ leaves flush crimson, thousands of acres of open space appear to burn again. To me, there is hardly a more lovely sight on earth, literally beauty from ashes.
Spacious Delight
All these places—pristine, healing, or permanently altered—speak of resurrection. Their message is not the twinkling-of-an-eye fix of all the sad things that ever took place, but the slow, almost imperceptible mustard seed growth of new life in the shadow of the old. It doesn’t make itself known right away. But it is there, hidden, waiting to outlast the destruction with unimaginable flourish.
Later in his poem, Hopkins concludes, “for all this, nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” The woods never give up. The truth and goodness of creation speak plainest in their beauty. The Holy Spirit, brooding over the bent world, imparts wisdom by the wonder of what God has made.
Perhaps wonder feels like wisdom because it is a gift from the one who brings us out into spacious places because he delights in us (Ps. 18:19). There is a sense in which God has chosen to communicate both His power and the favor in which we walk as His beloved children though creation. All God’s works speak. Even without words, “ their voice goes out into all the earth” (Ps. 19:3-4). As we consider our own creatureliness, the rest of creation shows us a God who is not embarrassed by our frailty but has ordered a world to sustain and fill us, even walking amid his hills and trees together with us for a time.
The grandeur of Creation, in large and small incarnations, lifts our heads, telling us that all that crushes and wearies us is yet part of a different, better story. Beauty represents God’s attunement to us, confirming the reality of truth and goodness when so many facts on the ground call them into question. It wraps the Lord’s love and glory and wrath and power into a form that cannot be apprehended, but only received.
When I go to the mountains, I remember.
Under the loud silence of a canopy of birds, in the steamy green darkness of an Appalachian cove, with silver-spotted skippers licking sweat from my forehead, I feel fully present in His world. My heart and mind are pulled back into curiosity and hope. I am held fast in my limits, sustained in abundance, and called to worship.
Featured Image: Poplar in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, June 2022.
Hardscrabble 