The Pain of Transformative Decay

Calling out to ancestral mycelial wisdom for imaginative survival

Destroying Dams / Opening the Flood Gates

Last night, the pain of a migraine forced me to close my eyes and breathe. I proceeded to move in and out of panic and grief for a while, before sobbing into the void of my empty apartment for what felt like hours. I moved from room to room, the crying coming and going, until I was able to allow the flood gates of my weary heart to fully open (while blood gushed between my legs, too). I rocked on the floor of my bedroom, wrapped my arms around shoulders, talked to myself and my younger parts, reassuring them that it’s okay to feel afraid and overwhelmed. I was terrified to be alone in this trauma release, as usual; wanted so badly to be held by a friend or an imaginary lover, wanted to call someone on the phone to ask them to talk to me about quotidian things while I fell asleep. Instead, I held me, and I felt what I needed to feel.

I reminded myself and my parts that transformative decay is awfully painful and disorienting. I wondered what it must be like to be a rotting log, to be eaten slowly by saprobic strands of mycelium and writhing insects. I turned off the fan in my window and listened to the crickets, the ancient timekeepers, who reminded me of the fleeting nature of my intense suffering. I called out to Spirit to help me, please, please, please, I am so low, I am below the earth like a worm, I am lost and I need your guidance. I finally fell asleep while watching seasonal kelp forests arise from the depths, sea cucumbers extending their ten arms into the warming waters to feast on starfish eggs.

The guidance I seek is continuously bubbling up within me, from the well of awareness I was born with. I know what I need, what my desires are, and I am continuously uncovering the truth: that seemingly indestructible dams have been constructed in me by oppressive ideology, to prevent the flow of liberatory intuition. We’re not supposed to be able to hear ourselves clearly because if we could, our rage and our power could overtake the demonic-hegemonic systems in a heartbeat.

Despite emotional resistance and mental distraction, I long for the flow of communal ritual. I must be responsible to the legacy of violence that I’ve inherited, and if I am to do so, I have to seek rooted connection with my ancestors. I not only need to continue grieving and undoing the racist colonial carnage they caused here on Turtle Island, but I need to reach back to the pre-colonial communities that made me possible. I must stay open to the possibility that there is a river of relational spiritual wisdom in my lineage that will break through the dams inside me. Their voices, traveling across the ages, will help me to find mine.

Modernity and white supremacy have made me extremely averse to the “spiritual” and “mindful” and “somatic” practices that are pushed to me through apps on my phone and other dominant pathways. I avoid them and the nauseating, individualistic bypassing they encourage. In doing so, I am remembering that I can subvert these hollow offerings by searching on my own time for the teachers and rituals that do resonate with what my bones know.

There is a vast realm of pagan animist stories in which I can find belonging. I know that pre-Christian traditions are aligned with what my body is asking me to do (dance, sing, honor death and rebirth, be in deep relationship with forests, make medicines from plants and mushrooms). Yes, I may be stuck in a city apartment that makes me grind my teeth in discomfort and dissatisfaction, but I can escape to other lands nonetheless. If Sophie has taught me anything, it’s that there are ecosystems of fertile abundance and gestalt complexity within reach at all times, even while bedbound. One of those essential ecosystems is that of my own ailing body, which contains not only the buzzing and bustling of billions of microbial musicians, but the landscape of my memory and my absurdly vivid dreams.

Feral, Imaginative Grief

I wonder if I can embrace the fact that I needed to go through this period of complete burnout in order to refine and harmonize what actually matters to me. I judge myself incessantly—for getting caught up in the human realm, for not focusing on my more-than-human kin with curiosity and reverence, for feeling self-pity at my ever-increasing disability reality. Naturally this inner critic (which helped me to survive the brutal Critic who was/is my Mother) feels like a threat to my other vulnerable parts, who then become even more fatigued and averse to choosing something nourishing.

I would not have this self-knowledge if I hadn’t been living it for the last 18 months. I know now that there is a limit to how much defeat I can experience before I simply must make other choices. Yes, the depression will return, and I will succumb to numbness and distractions that feel empty. But I am myceliating one cell at a time towards self-compassion and grace when I am lost, when I need another viewpoint to reorient my despondent gaze.

I am working on a much longer piece about the Afrofuturist writers and thinkers who have inspired me to stay tethered to my imagination. I know that whiteness and colonial capitalism intend to strip us bare of our abilities to imagine other worlds, bright futures, harmonious relationships with the land and ourselves. If I become battered and beaten by this violent intent, I am surrendering to the wrong forces. I want so desperately to instead surrender to the wisdom of the soil, the wisdom of decay. Chronic pain, anxiety, depression, indigestion, and so many other maladies threaten to define me if I let them. Society at large would certainly want to categorize me through the lens of my inadequacies rather than the fierce feral power that hums within me, no matter how sick I become.

I have already surrendered to the knowing that my labor will not be given freely to the exploitative machine that surrounds us, that my time is more precious to me than any amount of financial freedom. I owe it to the black and indigenous teachers I have been blessed to learn from to rewire my heart, to not allow depletion to control me, to choose the relationships and practices that will sustain my body and my spirit.

Speaking of which! Although I have not (yet) had the fortune of encountering my favorite mycorrhizal mushrooms in the alpine forests this summer—despite wandering the woods slowly and calling out to them—my dear friends Ruthie and Barak brought me some Amanita muscaria caps that they stumbled upon while hiking yesterday. I have dehydrated them and will be infusing their magic into olive oil, to make a skin salve for pain relief. The hope is to continue to foster my relationship with not only the world’s most well-known folkloric fruiting body, but my Northern European ancestors and their traditional collaborations with it. (The salve will be abundantly shared with others, too, of course.) I am deeply grateful to have received such a delivery, my kinfolk bringing my fungal kin in a brown paper bag because they knew I would honor and enjoy the medicine within their red flesh.

August is rife with grief, liminal discomfort and sorrow. It eats me alive every time it comes around. And, at my therapist’s divine invitation, I will choose to ask for guidance from my father, who will have been gone for five years (already) on the 27th—and who, according to Mallory, is much better at loving me and seeing me and hearing me now, even though he struggled with those expressions of care when he was alive. I believe her, actually, because I dreamt it shortly after he died, his ability to witness me fully.

It has been a small but significant comfort to me lately, to realize that I can form a new relationship with him as my ancestor. I have always known about my father that he had a deeply animist sensibility, an effortless repartee with birds and trees and flowers that was never fully stifled by his Christian conditioning. As a wise adult who is in conversation with the wounded child inside, I can turn to him as my ancestor and follow the hyphal threads all the way back to the lands from which we were uprooted long ago. It’s a place to start, at least.