Morels and Magic

What comes after death.

I’m not a regular mushroom hunter but I have on a couple occasions identified chicken of the woods, which some call the “gateway drug” to mushroom hunting.

Years ago, Matt and I read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and were so tickled by the final chapter where Pollan cooks an entire meal from hunted and foraged items. He dives for abalone, picks local cherries, scours the forest for mushrooms, and even harvests wild yeasts from the air for sourdough bread. After closing the book, we set out on the Prairie Path by our shoebox apartment in downtown Wheaton, Illinois to mushroom hunt. After a couple hours of squatting and squinting in the undergrowth, we came home with some bug bites.

Which made our recent find all the more magical.

“Mama! Come out and see these weird mushrooms!” The kids had just zoomed out of the house to jump on the trampoline and came right back in with this announcement.

As I neared the far end of our wooded backyard, my eyes widened. “Are those…morels?!” Under the trampoline, brain-like tan blobs popped out of the leaf litter on stout white trunks. They clustered in twos and threes, like carnival-goers enjoying a leisurely afternoon. There were so many.

When I overhear mushroom hunter gossip, morels and chanterelles are among their choice finds. They are also fiercely secretive about their prime hunting spots. But this was our backyard. And my first find. I broke etiquette and posted a picture online to crowdsource the identification. I also watched a few YouTube videos on how to tell true morels from false morels. Key: true morels have hollow trunks. Their caps also connect straight to the trunk rather than flapping over the trunk like an umbrella.

It turned out that quite a few people in my neighborhood had found morels recently, in their backyards and even on walks down the street. A friend suggested that someone (a fairy?! ) had sprinkled morel spores all over town.

The thing about this find, at this moment, is that we had just returned from a weekend in Texas visiting my mom. She’s been getting worse with stomach cancer. That week in particular, it sunk in. I don’t have much time left with her. Sooner rather than later, I’ll be shaking hands again with Death.

The day of the morel find, my insides tangled with what has become a familiar feeling now—the dread of watching a loved one suffer and die.

But these scrumptious treats popping up in our backyard (yes, we definitely did harvest and eat them) reminded me of something else. A love note from God and the Universe, if you will.

Death is not the end. Beings die and decay. And out of that process you get…morels.

“Mama, what comes after death?” my oldest has asked me and my husband on multiple occasions when he can’t sleep at night. It’s understandable. Our family has had more than our share of death and illness recently. We tell him the Christian story. The humanist story. The Buddhist story. In short, we say, we really don’t know.

I would like to paint a solid picture for him of resurrection and being with God and Jesus and all our loved ones who have gone before, as I have been taught in the church. The truth is that I feel the way we talk about the afterlife is inadequate to its mystery (except maybe this article, which speaks so much to me). Our human constructs and human language cannot contain what is unspeakable and inconceivable. But it’s what we have. So I tell it. I also say this with utmost conviction, “We came from Love, we are held in Love now, and when we die we return to Love.”

Mushrooms grow out of rotting wood from dying trees. The entire fungal kingdom, in fact, feeds off dying things to transform them into the raw materials for life. In the ground beneath our feet, miles upon miles of thin white mycelium strands unfurl in an invisible, intelligent network, sharing nutrients, communicating information, and preparing the ground for something new to emerge. If this is, at least in part, the Love that we are returning to, I’m okay with that.

My mom’s love language is food. How do I know she loves me? Even as she’s in pain and feeling awful from chemotherapy, she’s harvesting string beans and cucumbers from her garden and making them into pickles for our family. Eat food. Feel loved. That is the story of my upbringing.

To eat a morel that inexplicably popped up in our backyard is to remember this: even though my mom is dying, this world is still full of love—and magic.

Whenever she returns to the earth, I will still be loved and fed.

Children’s Book Update

Matt has finished our children’s book illustrations and we’re over halfway to our goal to fund some of the upfront costs of hybrid self-publishing. Our Kickstarter fundraiser is all or nothing—meaning we don’t get any of the pledges if we don’t reach our $1,375 goal. To reach it, we need nine more people to pledge $35 and receive a signed copy of the book when it publishes, and three more people to pledge $65 to receive two signed copies.

We’re ahead of schedule on the production side, and aim to get the books into your hands by October if not earlier. They would make lovely Christmas gifts!

Thank you to those of you who have already pledged. We are so encouraged by your support.