It's nearly proper fungi season here, though I suspect it'll be another couple of weeks before the good edibles start. I think I might do a regular Fungi Friday post here in Fungi Lovers and try to catch up with other mycophiles on this day as well. It seems my head is full of mushrooms so I may as well!

I think this obsession with fungi does my brain good, giving me something to focus on when life gets a little crazy. There's something about crouching down taking a photo of a mushroom that captures your attention so completely that the rest of the world falls away. I don't mind being the mad mushroom lady - there's stranger things to be obsessed by.

The first and best photo of the season so far is this one, with the Landrover behind it. It's rather ragged, and was actually on it's side - I had to right it for the snap. I'm not sure what it is, but it was quite large and growing in very sandy soil. I think it's some kind of amanita but the annulus isn't quite clear - perhaps it's torn off?

The amanita species has about 600 varieties, but still, if I share an amanita muscaria people lose their shit and shout TOXIC! There's a lot of misinformation about mushrooms. Here's a few myths worth educating people about:

• Just because it's colourful, doesn't mean it's poisonous. A wood blewitt is delicious, a cortinarius is poisonous. Both are purple.
• It doesn't matter about the wood mushrooms grow on. If you get a tummy upset, the mushroom probably wasn't cooked enough. There's very, very few mushrooms that can be eaten raw. Even a tasty morel should be well cooked.
• Mushrooms grow no faster under a full moon.

Perhaps it's this I like about fungi - there's so many unknowns and so many things to find out, and they're so freaking important for humanity. Seriously. A world without fungi is a world without trees, beer and bread.

The word for world is fungi. I think of Le Guin here.

“A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.”

I wonder if Le Guin would write the same novel, given what we know about how important fungus is now. I think a lot about how if there is no fungi, there is no forest - this is how important it is to us. I wonder if she'd sneak 'mushroom' and 'fungi' into her writing, as such (bold words are my own):

“Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root and fungi. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

On Instagram, I've been sharing both real photos and writing with some AI art. I'm not sure how I feel about it but at least I can simply revert to my own photos and words if I turn away from AI. As I was saying to @edprivat, it is beginning to feel the AI is just reflecting the world back at us without coming up with something really new. I find myself putting in a prompt and finding the AI is coming up with something I didn't quite expected, and running with that. What was my original idea? How much is really mine?

Still, it has suprising results that get me thinking. I wanted to show an old woman in the forest, with mushrooms in her hair, similiar to a crown of thorns or berries. Midjourney usually just turns this into a funky mushroom hat - it's super frustrating not to get exactly what you want. However, there's two images I quite liked, stimulating ideas that went beyond what I came up with in the first place. The first was this - it is as if the crone's brain has become a mycelliate mass, connected to the forest. How beautiful this crone is, how calm, how connected to life.

I'm reminded of Ellie in 'The Last of Us' season finale. Cordyceps had taken hold in her brain at birth, and to remove it seems certain death. How I wish we all were so connected to nature that to remove it, we would quite literally die.

The second was how Midjourney interpreted 'a crone underneath a tree' (there was various other words in there too, but it is this aspect that resulted in such an image). The woman is literally UNDER the tree, whereas I mean beside it. Still, it seemed to play on ideas of underneath, and the mycellium beneath the trees and in the mycorhizzal zone. Here is a woman that is so completely of the forest that she dwells underneath it, but is still connected to it, just as everything truly is. She firmly and sternly stands guardian, ready to admonish those that poison, raze, burn, bulldoze.

I've changed my mushroom substrate again as the soy hulls seemed to make it really smell. The straw and sawdust means more fool proof. Sadly the ones I've sold need to be replaced so whilst I break even this time, I didn't profit at all. I think next time I'll put the buckets up for sale once I know they are mycelliated and about to pin, rather than just as I do them. It's not really an easy business model and Jamie thinks I should give it up entirely. 'But I love growing mushrooms' I wail.

I have all these ideas about creating around mushroom themes, but I feel like I'm still incubating, just like a bucket of mycellium.

With Love,

^{The Fungi Lovers Community: Home of #FungiFriday}

^{The Herbal Hive Community}

Are you on HIVE yet? Earn for writing! Referral link for FREE account here!