(Listen to me read the post)
When I wander through the forest, the trees demand my attention. Especially here on the west coast, where trees can stretch more than 90 metres into the sky and be as wide as 20 metres in circumference, I am dwarfed by their massive expanse. I often stop to stand in awe of them, gazing up to their dizzying heights.
If I were to only see the trees, though, I would be missing half the forest. Trees may be impressive, and they catch my attention first, but they only tell part of the story of what it means to be a forest. There is so much more here to discover. After looking up into the heights, I pause to move my gaze down, to notice the smallest of forest-dwellers – the rich green mosses, the multi-coloured lichen and mushrooms, the bugs, squirrels and other critters. (Some day I intend to wander with both binoculars and a magnifying glass, so that I can enhance both views.)
A healthy forest requires the contribution and presence of all these living beings. The trees may be impressive, but they don’t thrive on their own – they rely on the smallest of beings living far beneath their lofty heights, or crawling and flying among their branches. Bees and other pollinators help trees and other plants to propagate. Birds, squirrels, and other small creatures carry their seeds to other places to help spread the forest and replace deadfall.
Even further down, beneath the soil that the trees are rooted in, one of the most important and yet least visible living beings offers support to the entire forest. It’s fungi – the whole forest relies on it and its network beneath the soil. Mycelia (plural of mycelium) are the tiny “threads” of the greater fungal organism that wrap around or bore into tree roots. We spot fungi only occasionally – when a mushroom pops above the ground (mushrooms are the “fruit” of the fungus) – but the complex web of mycelia is always there, under a healthy forest floor.
Thanks to researchers like Peter Wohlleben and Suzanne Simard, we are learning more and more fascinating things about mycelia and their contributions to the forest. Woven together, mycelia compose what’s called a “mycorrhizal network,” which connects all the trees to each other and allows them to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals between them (sometimes referred to as the “wood wide web”). Mycelia can also act as a conduit for signalling between plants, acting as an early warning system for herbivore attack.
In the shady areas, where there is not enough sunlight reaching the leaves of saplings for them to perform adequate photosynthesis, taller trees send nutrients and sugar through the mycorrhizal network to their younger kin. Researchers at University of Reading in England found that Douglas fir trees can recognize the root tips of their relatives and favour them when sending carbon and nutrients through the fungal network. Like human and animal parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents, trees look after their young, and they couldn’t do it without mycelia.
There’s more. Not only do fungi serve as a communication network between trees, they also serve as clean-up crew and “digestive tract” of the forest. If there is a patch of forest that is being damaged by certain kinds of bacteria, fungi that feed on that type of bacteria can clean it from the soil, helping the trees and other plants in that area to recover. Where there are dead trees lying on the forest floor, fungi break them down into soil for other trees and plants to grow in. “If we didn’t have fungi,” says Paul Stamets, renowned mycologist, “we would get this build-up of plant matter that would choke the earth.”
“We don’t need more trees,” says naturalist and writer Obi Kaufmann, about the efforts to plant more trees in response to climate change. “We need more forests.” In other words, individual trees don’t work alone – they need to be part of the entire ecosystem of a forest.
Other than a few mushrooms now and then, I don’t often see visible evidence of the mycorrhizal network when I wander through the forest, but now that I am becoming increasingly aware of how amazing it is, I pay more careful attention. Together with the trees I stand next to, I send silent gratitude down into the soil for the way it supports the whole system.
I’ve been thinking about the forest’s ecosystem lately, as I support Krista in developing a new course called Not the Main Character (a learning and community space for those who love to help others shine). In a sense, what Krista is creating is specially designed to both shine the light on and be of support to the mycelial layer of our human systems. It’s the part of the system that is almost always the least visible, but is absolutely critical for the healthy functioning of the whole.
In the field of biomimicry, practitioners learn from and mimic the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges. Now... to be clear, I don’t think that humans are ever actually “outside of nature, looking in” – we ARE nature, so human designs are also natural designs. That said, we can learn a lot from returning to our kin in the woods, sitting with the trees, the mushrooms, and the ants that scurry along the ground. Some of our greatest lessons can come from witnessing the elaborate and intricate ways that species work together to help each other thrive and contribute to the good of the whole.
Many of our modern human cultures place too much emphasis on the value of being a tree and forget to look down at the other layers of the forest. Too many people want to be influencers, content creators, wealthy business owners, etc., and many of them pretend they have gotten there on their own. When Krista and I started the Centre for Holding Space, one of our greatest challenges was convincing a financial institution of the wisdom of creating a symbiotic partnership out of what had once been my solo venture. In their capitalist worldview, it was nonsensical for me to share my intellectual property and they had no lens through which to understand that it was never a one-woman operation and that Krista’s role was crucial to the health of the whole.
We have forgotten that nobody is ever truly self-made – we are all supported by networks of people, though some of those people may be invisible to the naked eye. Nobody becomes a healthy tree unless their roots are woven into the network of the entire system, and that system will become unhealthy if it only focuses on the trees.
In the ecosystem that is the Centre for Holding Space, I, as the person most visible to the outside eye, am largely a tree. But my ability to stand tall, to flourish, and to produce fruit and seeds for further growth, is entirely dependent on the rest of the system. Krista is the mycelium to my tree, connecting the entire network together, sending nutrients between trees, supporting the younger saplings, and helping to compost the waste into soil. There’s also a teaching team and network of colleagues that serve as squirrels and pollinators, helping to propagate and spread the work further than we could on our own.
Friends, if you sometimes feel like an invisible member of whatever ecosystem you’re part of, and yet you love your work and believe wholeheartedly in your contribution, know that you are valued in our ecosystem and you have our support. If you want to learn more about what it means to be mycelium, and if you want to have meaningful conversations about the role you and others like you play, join Krista in Not the Main Character.
If, on the other hand, you’re like me and tend to be the tree in your system, perhaps there are people in the system who need to be more seen and supported? Why not send them to the course so that they can find a community of other mycelia and learn more about how to nurture and network a healthy system? Or take the course yourself to learn more about the functioning of a healthy system and the value of all contributions. The course will benefit the whole system and even help you be a better tree.
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Related resources from which I drew for this piece:
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard
The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate, by Peter Wohlleben
Obi Kaufmann on the Ecotone of Art and Science (on For the Wild podcast)
Merlin Sheldrake on Embodied Entanglement (on For the Wild podcast)
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake
Fantastic Fungi – the book, and the documentary