I went walking at my local bushland reserve last Saturday. It was the first time I’d been there in … I don’t even know. Months. Maybe even a year. Time doesn’t work anymore, not that creepy chronos thing, and not circadianally either internally or externally, and barely even calendarically. Dali’s dripping clocks. Days go by in hours and minutes go by in seconds. The only time that makes any kind of sense to me these days is kairos time or else the kind of time so deep it’s hard to see its patterns.
It was chilly last Saturday. I walked counter-clockwise so I could see the cows at the beginning. Their paddock sides onto the walking trail and so they’re often close. Their hayshed has a pleasing rounded roof. One cow was especially near and gazed up at me as I approached. The kind of cow that looks like a giant black Labrador and which would therefore be incurring Lester’s wrath if he was still here. No bulging udders. So beef. Could I look her in the eye when she was beef? I did, and it was limpid, and yea, she listened to my inane chatter for a few beats before she bent her head down again to rip up the next clump and I had to once again reckon with the fact that I live on a note of an octave that eats everything else and do I feel guilt about that or is it just how it just is?
This is probably gonna make me sound totally old-fashioned, but I find it unutterably rude to not acknowledge a stranger as you approach each other on a walking trail. I know, right? What a stupid old bag. But there’s a power in it, I reckon, a strengthening, acknowledging each other in our shared spaces. Although maybe even the local bushland reserve doesn’t count as a shared space in many people’s minds anymore. It’s not ours, it’s the state government’s. Maybe we don’t have any shared spaces in our enclosed minds anymore. But it’s a danger. Who are the people in your neighbourhood? They’re the people that you meet when you’re walking down the street and they’re the people that you will be relying upon when the shit hits the fan. A people who have been moulded to think they do not need to acknowledge strangers are a people divorced from the sense of the whole that is intrinsic to our central nervous systems. We are divorced from our own histories. But then, we were born into the colon of the kali yuga. What can you do?
The reserve was being walked, as it generally always is, by a decent smattering of people, a great many of who did not even bother to look at me as we walked past each other. Now, I know I’m touchy on this. I’m a highly sensitive person. I can feel criticism when it is not even given. But it’s not for that reason that I am so resentful of this loss of stranger-greeting. It’s not the personal insult that makes me so touchy about it. Or maybe it is. Maybe if I wasn’t so bloody sensitive I wouldn’t care so much about the collective sense. Or maybe I would. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.
Of course, I could stop focussing on all the people who scare me, the ones who seem to be marching blindly without knowing where they are. But perhaps I underestimate them. Who am I to judge what goes on in the insides of other people? Who am I to focus on other people’s characters and find them all wanting when I could be focussing on the ones I see online who are doing a million and one things that show that plenty of people are tapped into the future and attempting to make it our own? I’m such a negative arsehole. I actually get sucked into believing all the shit I see on the internet is some kind of determinant of where we’re at collectively when I know it’s more an advertisement of how the purveyors of the crumbling edifice wish us to see it as, wish for our quiet and silent consumer complicity.
Anyway, back to the reserve last Saturday. There are still things you can do in a public reserve that you can’t do on the street. Sitting around and staring into the distance, for instance. Just sitting. I saw a few people doing that. People are beautiful when they’re just sitting, staring, slack-jawed. Notice how anyone loitering on the street looks extra suss in these days of paranoia? However, If you stand around on the street talking to yourself, no one will think you mad, they’ll just think you’re on a call. But stand around and stare at the sky in the street, and you’re a fruitcake.
Now, foragers look suss like street-starers, even in a public reserve. Especially in a public reserve. Especially in magic mushroom period, that runs approximately from April to September, and from which I have still not had any success in my attempt to find mushrooms with which to expand, despite them being prevalent everywhere. Because I’m an idiot.
I was feeling exuberant from walking despite feeling lonely from unfriendly strangers. So when I saw a young woman foraging in the side trail near the creek with her dog, I approached her and jokingly asked her if she was foraging for the people’s special friends. I’m surprised I dared speak to her at all, really. I’m such a fucking wuss these days. But surprisingly, she was lovely, and boppy and upbeat. Said she was looking for all types because she just loved them all, loved their beauty.
We rhapsodised a little about the network that runs underneath all our feet, that provides forests a way to communicate underground. The woodwide web, the writer of The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben, calls it. I suggested it was an important thing for people like us in an age of such fragmentation to hang onto. She nodded enthusiastically. Said how lovely it was to talk to someone else who appreciated the beauty of the network. Her dog stopped barking at me and allowed me to hug him round his black and white ruff. All the alienation I’d felt before evaporated in an instant.
It doesn’t take much.
“The thing is,” the woman said, “the longer I look, the more I see.”
The weather last Tuesday was the kind of autumnal edgy sexy sun slant that lays a gentle hand across your face and breaks and mends your heart in one beat. Every autumn and winter renews my desire to continue living here on Melbourne’s hilly outskirts. Autumn locks me in for another year, and winter, my least favourite season, seals the deal. A winter on the flatlands is depressing fare, with so much concrete scattered about. But here, winter makes sense. The fog gets a place to hang.
That slant of the autumn sun suggested another walk at Birdsland was due. Two in one week. Rich. The people walking there turned out to be almost all friendly this time, despite it being Tuesday. And the sun did doth dapple on the water and glint on all the greenery and a little boy did stand, blond curls pouring out of his bike helmet, pissing on the side of the walking track because, as his mum did smile, unnecessarily apologetically, when you gotta go you gotta go.
I know it’s not good form to say a young child standing holding his tiny little willy and streaming into the bushes looked adorable. But he did. His bare bum and sturdy legs looked adorable too. Why is it that in the service, seemingly, of the good, so much is taken away from us? That’s the new activism, have you noticed? Not much of it making the people as a class feel a greater sense of connection to each other. Oh, no. This is activism neoliberalism-style. In the service of stopping paedophilia (good luck with that), any excuse to wedge some self-doubt into people already divided from each other does wonders for guilt, shame and isolation. In the service of proving I’m against paedophilia, I must stop seeing an innocent kid through (at least at that particular moment) innocent eyes. Well, fuck that. Not everything we think or feel is a pathology, no matter how many different cowpens of division GlaxoSmithPfizerUnilever wish to corral us into occupying.
So yes, that little kid was adorable, of course he was. But as if that adorable scene wasn’t enough, I also got to see something else: a dog, who barked at me because she was apparently exuberant from the wind, but who, as I turned to look back at her after I passed had two round beige pieces of tricoloured fur, big round Beyonce buttocks that framed her actual buttocks, which were not there, because she is a dog. That dog’s fur was like an advertisement for her own bum.
I get a lot out of seemingly inoccuous interactions with people and dogs I don’t know at the park. I return to them in the days following. They help me feel secure in these days of wild insecurity. We are all connected. We are the symbiocene.
The largest mycelium network discovered so far is also the largest organism on the planet. It is a honey fungus that lives in Oregon. It measures 3.8 kilometres across.
In 2017, a mushroom species was discovered growing on a garbage dump in Pakistan. This mushroom had developed a taste for eating plastic. It was doing what everything on earth does – adapting to the prevailing conditions. This may be one of the ways nature will help us to deal with the plastic problem that has become a visual for the stupidities of capitalism – a sea of satanic linear logic which spilled itself into the oceans and into the fish, where it has come full circle into our own bodies as microplastic, to remind us that the idea that we are separate from the world is a story whose end has come.
Meanwhile, mushroom plastics continue being developed. These plastics are different. They will be as convenient as the plastic of the past, but will reflect their status as a properly natural substance – in other words, they will return to the soil as compost once they have finished being used. Like the rest of the natural world, they will leave no imprint on the earth once they’re gone except to replenish with nutrients the soil from which it came.
I remind myself, when I feel the despair that washes over, that this is the earth we are dealing with, and if we can just stop shitting down her neck she may be able to recover faster than we think, and more generously than we imagine. She is nothing if not intelligent.