The Garrulous Jay – Magic Mushrooms

Over the last six months I’ve been on a journey. It began back in January with me sitting in bed and concluded last week after I emerged from the shady glades of central Corfu and flew back to Norfolk.

During this time I have experienced a range of emotions and overall there have been more highs than lows.

I have gained a fresh understanding of the world and the way it works, encountering new and extraordinary life forms along the way.

I have even been forced to question the nature of my own existence: where I end and the rest of the universe begins.

And all of this just by reading Merlin Sheldrake’s fascinating book, Entangled Life.

As its subheading states, the book is about “how fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures”.

With hindsight it is remarkable to think that fungi have only existed since 1969: that’s less time than I’ve been alive. It was only then that they were formally proposed as a distinct kingdom of life, despite being some of the oldest organisms on the planet.

It is perhaps partly for this reason that there is still so much we don’t understand about fungi and their role in sustaining life on earth.

It is likely that fungi facilitated the movement of the first plant-like organisms from water onto land.

There is also an argument that fungi were central to man’s move from hunter-gatherers to sedentary agrarian societies. The Beer Before Bread theory argues that when humankind’s predecessors first descended from trees to the forest floor they encountered fermenting fruit, the effects of which incentivised the first cultivation of grains to produce alcohol.

The ease of the production of beer and other alcohol-containing liquids, and the stimulant effects of their consumption drove the social cohesion and creativity that facilitated this evolutionary leap. All thanks to yeast.

Fungi are literally everywhere…

A single honey mushroom fungus in the Rocky Mountains is thought to be the world’s largest organism, spanning some 2,385 acres. But we also have millions of fungi in our gut and on our skin, maintaining and regulating us as healthy organisms. 

Plants and fungi are co-dependent as the former rely upon the latter to extract nutrients from soil through their roots, and the latter derive energy from the former.

Only now are we starting to appreciate how fungi may be able to help us sustain the planet. Some strains of fungi have been seen to ‘eat’ everything from cigarette butts to plastics to nuclear waste. They can be dried and used to build homes. They may even be able to survive in space.

Ultimately, they are both extraordinary life-savers as well as poisonous killers.

I have written before about the value of perspective: how we can derive this from books, time and travel, and how it can help us in both our professional and personal lives.

Reading Sheldrake’s book has done this for me and I feel better for it.