Fungi Jedi

A mycorrhiza (from Ancient Greek μύκης (múkēs) 'fungus' and ῥίζα (rhíza) 'root'; pl. mycorrhizae, mycorrhiza, or mycorrhizas) is a symbiotic association between a fungus and a plant. The term mycorrhiza refers to the role of the fungus in the plant's rhizosphere, the plant root system and its surroundings. Mycorrhizae play important roles in plant nutrition, soil biology, and soil chemistry. In a mycorrhizal association, the fungus colonizes the host plant's root tissues, either intracellularly as in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, or extracellularly as in ectomycorrhizal fungi. The association is normally mutualistic. (from wikipedia, the queen of rhizomatic knowledge)

With four hundred million years of combined evolutionary wisdom, the soil beneath our feet hide an incredible fungi network, even more expansive than internet itself, connecting plants to exchange nutrients, water and information — as chemical signals — such as alerts of danger, sources of stress like salinization or pathogens, droughts or some animal munching on the leaves. They also often function as support networks to younger plants, or as storage space for the tree roots, and even as anchors for huge trees to stand firmly in the ground. As with the human body, which couldn't stand for us to think and act in the world as fully conscious beings without our toes to ground us in the soil, the little fungi filaments in the roots of the tree are the crucial beginning of the story that continues with the verticality she engages with above the soil. Standing tall reaching towards the sky.

Tree as a grandmother who encompasses all beings in the hug of her branches, roots and symbiotic relationships, the nests nurishing the bird families who choose her as warm housing, the plants and fungi growing on her bark, various animals eating her leaves and insects finding a safe playground on her vinicity. And all of us, surviving, by breathing her oxygen in exchange of the garbage air we spit out, useless and even harmlful to us, but for her, in her infinite wisdom and care, finding ways to turn carbon dioxide into gifts to keep life going in a perpetual cycle. Every breath we take, every sip of water, is connected somehow to the forest. And the forest can't be seen as a collection of trees, without thinking about the mycorrhiza that connects each other to others and to the soil, always searching and decaying at rapid speeds, expanding towards nutrients while helping to stabilize the soil.

How can we learn to feel more of this continuity between body and forest, embracing the concept of interbeing and expanding our sense of self to include the planet around us?
And how can we direct attention to the little rhizomes underneath our own stories, the almost imperceptible encounters with others that affect us towards becoming who we are, stabilizing the self as the ground where things grow?