The Day I Became a Mushroom

By Jacqueline I. Topakian, GENEVA HOLISTIC

There are moments in life when something happens that cannot be explained from a purely three-dimensional perspective, something that can only be understood through a deep knowing, a knowing that arrives long before the mind has any chance to make sense of it.

Most of the time we move through life experiencing our surroundings from a human and rather egotistical standpoint, taking things for granted, rarely questioning the hive mind we have all quietly agreed to live inside, and in doing so we miss the extraordinary, magical gifts that are present all around us, waiting to be recognised, in every place and at every moment. These unprecedented magical moments can only be experienced once we shift the way we perceive things in relationship to ourselves, once we allow our usual way of looking at the world to soften and fall away, and, as you’ll see, sometimes to fall down entirely. This is a true story, one of many I could tell, but a beautiful one.

The Empty Basket

I experienced this many years ago, on an autumn walk through a forest I knew. Every year, when the season was right, I would return in search of boletus mushrooms, my favourites for a good risotto, and over the years I had come to know its secret paths and its hidden corners almost as well as I knew myself. Walking beneath those trees with my basket, had become one of the simple joys of my year. There is something singular about finding food in the wild, something that connects us to a time when human beings still lived in direct relationship with the Earth, because foraging, when you really pay attention to it, is not simply an act of collecting, but a harmonious conversation with the natural world.

That day, however, the conversation seemed to have stopped entirely. I went to every hidden corner I knew, searching for nearly two hours beneath the trees, across the moss, and around the fallen branches where mushrooms had always appeared in past years, and yet I found nothing at all, not even one small, apologetic little mushroom peeking out to say hello. My basket stayed empty while my patience turned first to frustration and then, before long, to the kind of mild indignation only a determined mushroom hunter can truly understand. "Where are they", I kept asking myself, "why can’t I find any today of all days, have they gone into hiding specifically to test me?" I had entered the forest carrying an expectation, and without noticing it, that expectation had slowly built itself into a wall between the forest and me, so that the harder I searched, the more disconnected I felt.

Becoming the Mushroom

Eventually I gave up the chase altogether, and I sat down on an old fallen trunk. I closed my eyes, and tried to settle into a state of meditation, hoping simply to release my frustration and reconnect with the forest’s energy. Yet underneath that meditation, one small desire was still pulsating and it kept making me restless, because in truth I still wanted very much to find those mushrooms, and no amount of deep breathing was going to trick me out of that.

Nevertheless, I managed, little by little, to quiet my mind, and after about ten minutes of real stillness, I heard a voice, though it wasn’t quite a voice in the ordinary sense, more a sharp and entirely unshakeable message, an inner knowing that simply appeared, fully formed, inside my awareness, and it said: "if you want mushrooms, you need to become a mushroom."

I was startled. "Become a mushroom", I remember thinking, "are you absolutely serious?" In that very moment, it made no logical sense whatsoever, yet the message came again, more specific this time, entirely unbothered by my scepticism, telling me to become one of them, to meet them at their level, to put physically my body on the Earth, to feel the soil, to connect with the mycelium beneath it. My analytical mind, that part of me that presumes it is the responsible adult in the room, immediately produced a full list of objections: there would be dirt directly on my clothes, there was almost certainly a tick somewhere in that moss with my name on it; and, there was a very real chance that some perfectly ordinary hiker might walk round the corner to find me lying face-down in the forest. Something in me understood exactly what I needed to do anyway, even while my ego stood off to one side, arms crossed, thoroughly unconvinced.

Somehow I managed to quiet that mental chatter, ticks and reputation and all, and I lowered my whole body onto the forest floor, palms open against the damp soil, chin close to the ground, letting go of the position of the observer and stepping fully, and slightly ridiculously, into the position of the participant, and as I did, I said quietly to myself, with as much sincerity as a person face-down in the dirt can manage, "I am becoming a mushroom!"

Instantly, something shifted. I cannot fully describe it, because it was not an ordinary experience by any measure. The boundary between myself and my surroundings softened and then simply dissolved, and I felt myself connected to something deeply alive, as though I had been plugged directly into the hidden universe beneath the surface, into the world of roots and mycelium that had been there all along, just beyond my ordinary awareness. There was no ego left in that moment, no concerns whatsoever, only stillness, and what felt like a deep, telepathic bond with the forest’s vast underground network, an extraordinary sense of being accepted and received exactly as I was. I have no idea how long I remained there, whether it was five minutes or fifteen, because time itself seemed to have quietly disappeared.

When I finally opened my eyes, still lying on the ground, without moving my head, I slowly began to take in the space around me, aware that I was, in some sense, back in this dimension, and quietly relieved that no hikers had, in fact, walked by.

And there they were.

Six magnificent boletus mushrooms stood about 30cm above my head, arranged in a deliberate semicircle, as though they had been waiting patiently for me to stop looking so hard and simply join them at ground level. Moments earlier, that very spot had been empty. The forest had probably been waiting for me to arrive at this experience; to go down, become a mushroom, and in doing so, raise my vibrational state through play and surrender.

Lying there, still slightly muddy, I understood something else too, something that felt just as important as the mushrooms themselves, that the vibrational state of playfulness and wonder is something we need to learn to choose, deliberately, again and again, especially in the moments when life feels heaviest.

GENEVA HOLISTIC

www.jacquelinetopakian.com

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