What Grows in the Dark?
I think mushrooms have bitten off more than they can chew.
To quietly commit to filling every dark, damp corner of the forest—right when it’s most needed—with structure, beauty, and renewal is no small ambition. Yet they do it without announcement. They arrive in countless forms and textures, deploying wildly different strategies to spread, to feed, to hold and redirect the forest’s energy. They are engineers and artists at once.
What they offer isn’t just sustenance or decay—it’s spirit. A reminder that complexity thrives in the shadows, that diversity is not decoration but survival.
I suspect people are much the same inside. As varied, colorful, and multidimensional as any patch of forest floor after rain. But in human form, we look frustratingly alike. Our shared outer shell of flesh disguises the astonishing range of interiors within us—different depths, different hungers, different ways of growing toward light.
Maybe that sameness dulls our curiosity. It makes us forget to question the breadth of what lives inside one another. Mushrooms don’t make that mistake. They insist—quietly, persistently—that difference is the whole point.
I think mushrooms have bitten off more than they can chew.
To quietly commit to filling every dark, damp corner of the forest—right when it’s most needed—with structure, beauty, and renewal is no small ambition. Yet they do it without announcement. They arrive in countless forms and textures, deploying wildly different strategies to spread, to feed, to hold and redirect the forest’s energy. They are engineers and artists at once.
What they offer isn’t just sustenance or decay—it’s spirit. A reminder that complexity thrives in the shadows, that diversity is not decoration but survival.
I suspect people are much the same inside. As varied, colorful, and multidimensional as any patch of forest floor after rain. But in human form, we look frustratingly alike. Our shared outer shell of flesh disguises the astonishing range of interiors within us—different depths, different hungers, different ways of growing toward light.
Maybe that sameness dulls our curiosity. It makes us forget to question the breadth of what lives inside one another. Mushrooms don’t make that mistake. They insist—quietly, persistently—that difference is the whole point.
