The Secret Lives of Mushrooms

Probably even before I was in kindergarten, my parents warned me that the mushrooms that occasionally popped up in neighborhood yards should not be eaten because they could be poisonous.  To emphasize the point, they explained that you could not tell by appearance whether the mushrooms were poisonous or not. And so, when cooked mushrooms were first served up to me on my dinner plate, I simply looked at them, thinking, "You cannot tell by their appearance whether they are poisonous or not."

Although I now know a bit more about mushrooms, I wish I had learned more about them back then.  I might have appreciated them more.  There is a lot most people do not know about these strange beings. In fact, mushroom "plants," for the most part, lead secret lives.

I referred to mushrooms as "plants" in the preceding sentence, putting the word in quotation marks because they are not classified by biologists as being in the plant kingdom. They do not have green chlorophyll to convert sunlight into sugar through photosynthesis, as do trees, shrubs, and grasses.  Instead, mushrooms are a sophisticated form of fungi, serving a role in the creation of rich soil.  What we see above ground are the reproductive bodies occasionally "flowering" up from the base below ground, producing spores rather than seeds.  (Perhaps it was the sudden appearance of mushrooms at night that led to mushrooms having been associated with fairies.)

I did omit one detail in my confession about being afraid to eat cooked mushrooms:  As kids, we did not usually call them "mushrooms." We said "toadstools" instead.  That name engaged my childhood curiosity.  I think I secretly hoped that I might catch sight of a small toad comfortably seated on top of one of the "stools," even though toads were farther and few between than mushrooms where we lived.  (Is there any end to the things a child wishes for?)

Having now gotten well beyond my childhood caution about possibly dying by poisoned mushroom, I have a couple of times picked one, but not to cook it.  Instead, I wanted to get a closer look at the underside of the cap.  Hidden there are what seem like a hundred thin leaves radiating out from the center, all looking like the fanned pages of a book.

In illustrations in children's books, mushrooms have been part of the imagined world of exotic animals, elves, and fairies.  When mushrooms rise from the rim of the unseen body below ground they sometimes form a rough circle, imagined to be a "fairy ring."

As a child, I never really believed in fairies. Nevertheless, I do like to occasionally think about silent mushroom bodies living their own lives below the surface of the ground.  Millions of them, all around the Earth.  Silently living and waiting.  Unhurried.  Waiting not for us, but for the right conditions to reproduce.  Just as they did for over half-a-billion years before there were any humans around to hurry, and to believe.

~~~

Have you ever been surprised by suddenly appearing mushrooms?  Where?

(The photo of the pair of mushrooms is by Ezhuttukari.

The photo of the clusters of small mushrooms is by Stu Phillips.

Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licenses.)

Of Nests and Love and Nurturing

It is a tale of tender, parental care -- among both humans and birds.  It is also a tale of love, even among the birds, dare I say, even if instinctive.  The story will eventually lead to the family of a virtually forgotten 19th-century author.  But let me begin with the matter of those birds.

The contemporary naturalist David Attenborough, in his TV series and book Life on Earth, pointed out how so much of birds' instincts, behavior, and time expended is centered on nurturing one thing:  the egg, and, of course, what comes from it.  He wrote, "Birds... have to incubate their eggs and that is a very dangerous business."

Now shift back over a century to the Centennial Exposition of 1876, a world's fair held in Philadelphia.  Among the exhibits was a display of the now famous artwork of John James Audubon, who introduced Americans to many of the birds of the North American continent. The critical link in this story is that among the fascinated viewers of Audubon's art was a twenty-nine year-old woman named Genevieve Jones.  Audubon's work engaged with two of her own interests.  Growing up, she had learned watercolor painting from her mother. And she had collected bird nests while accompanying her doctor father on his buggy rounds to patients.

Genevieve Jones

"Gennie" Jones became captivated by the idea of creating a book similar to Audubon's but covering the 130 species of birds that nested in the state of Ohio, where she lived with her parents. She hoped such a book would enable people to do something she had been unable to do as a child -- identify such nests as that of a Baltimore oriole.  The immense project was undertaken, with Genevieve and a friend learning how to make the life-sized lithographic drawings.  Her brother helped collect nests, and her father financed the project.  Neighborhood girls helped hand-color the prints.

Then tragedy struck.  Only two years into the project, with only part of the book published,

Genevieve caught typhoid fever and died.  Nevertheless, just in the way that birds do not abandon a nest after one of the chicks dies, the Jones family committed themselves to completing the project.  The mother learned how to make illustrations more scientifically precise than she ever had.  The technology of the time required transporting the sixty-five-pound printing stones to a printer 50 miles away in Cincinnati. After seven more years, the project was completed. Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of the Birds of Ohio, with text by Genevieve's brother, was published in 1886.

The full story of Genevieve Jones, her family, and their book is told in America's Other Audubon by Joy M. Kiser (© 2012).  I am struck by how the matter of parental nurturing weaves throughout the tale:  Birds nurturing their young in nests.  The parents of Genevieve nurturing their daughter's love of art and of Nature.  The entire family contributing to the Illustrations of Nests project.  And all of that nurturing symbolized by those all so natural nests.

~~~

Do you have any remembrances of nests or of birds nesting?

(The quote about birds is from

 Life on Earth by David Attenborough, © 1979,  p. 195.)

The Earnestness and Frivolity of Flowers

The painter Georgia O'Keeffe once said, "A flower is relatively small."  And yet she depicted them as being enormous!  Her easily identifiable paintings of flowers, which were one of her favorite subjects later in her career, often depict a single, huge, brightly-colored flower spilling over the edges of the canvas.  One of O'Keeffe's flowers can cover a hundred times its square-area in real life.  A biologist could easily appreciate that out-of-scale depiction, although for biological rather than aesthetic reasons.  After all the flower was a revolution in the evolution of life on planet Earth.

Green plants with photosynthesizing chlorophyll did exist on our planet before there were flowers.  However, it could take those conifers over a year to produce seeds snugly nested in cones.  One revolution flowers brought (when they evolved 100 million years ago) was the ability to release a seed in only a month.  That was an explosion in reproductive capability. That flower-explosion also brought about a revolution in the prehistoric world of animals.  As flowers evolved into different shapes, the insect world evolved simultaneously, new insects being adapted to take advantage of new food-source shapes.  In turn, bird and mammal species found new food in the flowers, seeds, and insects, thus putting competitive pressure on the older species of dinosaurs.

Today, understandably, few people are thinking about such significant events in the history of planet Earth when they purchase or pick a flower.  Flowers can be an earnest business for commercial flower-growers and florists.  But it is a flower's enjoyable color, fragrance, and shape that capture an average person's attention.

True, flowers do sometimes become a part of solemn ceremonies.  A wreath of flowers can soften the hard edge of a coffin, thus soothing the hearts of the bereaved.  Despite the flower's fragility, symbolizing the transitoriness of life, its reproductive associations bring a hint of life into the acceptance of death.

More frequently, however, flowers shout out "life!"  The humorist Mark Twain made the earnest observation that "Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole."  Over a century later, men wear boutonnieres much less often. But the symbolic tie between flowers and restored life endures.  All the way down to anti-war demonstrators inserting flowers into phalanxed soldiers' rifle barrels.

With their colorful intensity and their message of new life, specific flowers have gained a role as a prominent symbol in many of the world's faith-traditions:  The lily of Easter resurrection in Christianity. The lotus of life-giving tranquility in Buddhism. And the light-giving Golden Flower in Taoism.

For the billions of bees and other insects who search for food each day, flowers are a serious business.  But for most people, flowers are just plain fun!

~~~

Where do you encounter flowers?  Do you have any favorites?  What do they express?

Animals Emerging Out of Darkness

Tens of thousands of years ago, human beings would have sat around fires after dark, listening to storytellers.  Occasionally their eyes would have followed sparks rising upward in the fire's heat -- bright sparks joining the stars against the darkness of the night sky.  I imagine that while looking up into the night sky and listening to the storyteller, their minds would have begun to see shapes -- constellations -- emerging out of the myriad stars:  Images of animals and of people.  There, a bear!  And there, a scorpion!

An immense time later, in the 9th century C.E., a man named Jahiz (or "al-Jahiz") described a different way that animals emerged out of darkness.  Jahiz wrote about how he and Bedouin travelers camping in the desert at night had repeatedly observed a series of animals coming out of the surrounding darkness.  First came the flying insects, drawn into the campfire's circle of light.  Then, looking for food as well as warmth, came lizards, mice, snakes, and even foxes. Sometimes as many as seventy different kinds of animals would emerge on a single night.

 
from The Book of Animals

Jahiz collected such accounts and spun them together with stories, other observations of animals, and philosophical reflections in his Book of Animals.  It was more than an inventory of those animals that emerged out of the darkness.  What also emerged into the awareness of the Bedouins and Jahiz was how the animals seemed to form a hierarchy from tiny to large, and how the animals' lives were tied together with multiple interrelationships. Jahiz (being also a writer of philosophy and theology) added to that awareness his answer to some Bedouins' question of why the Creator had made noxious creatures.  Jahiz explained to his companions in the desert (and to his readers) that:  "Each species constitutes a food for another species....  Divine Wisdom has decreed that some species are the source of food for others, and some species are the cause of death for others."

Orpheus and the Beasts

Constellations emerging into focus. Real animals coming out of the darkness.  So also have animals emerged into the lives, culture, consciousness, and imagination of human beings.  That emergence occurred in a transformative way in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago, when animals were domesticated for food and labor. There was also another form of emergence as animals became part of humans' mythologies, legends, fables, and proverbs.

In the 20th century, as our societies became more urban, animals often faded into the background, often forgotten except for when we took outings to the zoo or to national parks. Today, however, I think animals might be re-emerging into our human consciousness in a new way.  As we watch TV shows such as Nature and National Geographic, we learn about more of life's immense diversity -- the number of species being almost as innumerable as stars in the night sky.  Also, we are trying to bring into sharper focus how we might be caretakers for threatened species so that they will not become extinct, like stars extinguished into darkness.

~~~

Are there occasions on which you think of animals?  What are those occasions?

(The Jahiz quote is from his Living Beings,

as quoted in Darwin's Ghosts by Rebecca Stoat, © 2012, p. 53.)
(The page from the Arabic book is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.) 

Not in Jest

I am not a seer.  Nevertheless, I can predict one news story that will assuredly be on my radio every April 2nd:  There will be a news story explaining how some other news story the preceding day was only an April Fool's hoax.  The inevitability of that post-April-Fool's story makes me want to not believe anything I hear on any April 1st.  It seems it might be safer to just wait twenty-four hours until everything gets sorted out.

But life won't wait for everything to be cleared up.  There are too many things I have to accept as if they were true, or I would be paralyzed.  Even stepping out my front door in the morning, I have to assume the ground will support me the way it did the day before.

These thoughts came to me after I was struck by the similarity between two quotations, even though their authors never met.  The first quotation is from Islam's primary scripture, the Qur'an (Koran).  In this passage, God (using the royal plural) tells us:

"Know that We did not create the heavens and the earth,

 and all that is between them, in frivolous play."

Reading that passage, I recalled immediately a quotation by the 19th century American writer Henry David Thoreau. It goes like this:

"God did not make this world in jest;

 no, nor in indifference.

 These migrating sparrows

 all bear messages that concern my life."

These lines from Thoreau tell me that I should treat the world of Nature around me --  a world not made by humans -- with an earnestness.  Even treating it as having messages for me.  The line quoted from the Qur'an, in its context, tells me the same.  It is a view also expressed by the traditional Christian idea that Nature can in some fashion be read as the "Book of Nature," with its messages about God.

Even if I do turn my attention away from the many distractions of our highly technological society to look at Nature for awhile, the challenge can be that there are so many "messages," and they do not always seem to be saying exactly the same thing.  One "message" Spring brings feels comfortably warming after the harsh winter.  Another "message" that Spring often delivers irritates my allergies and can lead to a sinus infection.  And those are only two of the messages at one particular time of year in my "Inbox" from Nature.

It can be a bit like trying to sort out which e-mails are junk-mail needing only a glance, which e-mails are easily misleading spam, and which are personal e-mails I should truly slow down for, letting the inner message sink into my mind and heart.  Only some messages seem to be "signs" in the sense of pointing significantly to deeper truths.

Nevertheless, perhaps by just going through the "Inbox" of Nature every day -- being sure it gets my attention -- I will be invigorated.  For, as the 20th-century author Isaac Bashevis Singer said:

"What nature delivers to us is never stale."

~~~

Is there a particular time during the day when you have a chance to turn your attention to Nature? What is that occasion?  How does observing it affect you?

(The verse from the Qur'an is 21:16.)

(The Singer quote is from New York Times Magazine, 26 Nov. 1978,

 as quoted in A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes, © 1992.  87:108.)