Things I thought about today
Mangroves, mycelium and paddy fields
Hi everyone! I don’t have a poem-poem today, but I did have Some Thoughts. So here is a collection of (largely unrelated) vignettes from my Sunday.
1. Today I saw some mangrove trees:
There is something otherworldly about the mangrove tree.
The way it rises up from the brackish wetlands, long aerial roots dangling like soft limbs and breathing oxygen above ground.
Where few other plants manage to grow, the mangrove tree lives on seawater by filtering out the salt through its roots. The seeds of the mangrove tree, I learn, can make its own food.
In the dense salt air of these coastal wetlands, I can see it so clearly: everything is always finding a way to live. Even where it should be impossible.
2. And found some mushrooms:
On your birthday, we go mushroom hunting in the wet grass.
You find an orange one, flaring like a flame, velvet to the touch. I find a tiny yellow one, hollow and papery. You find a flat dark one, that fades out into red. We look at this one for a long time, the way it resembles evening slipping into night. The whole sky captured in a leathery piece of fungi. Then I find a blue one, the colour of spilt ink blotches. We look each one up, hoping to find their scientific names. We search for more.
But what we really want is to learn the mysterious ways of mycelium. Speak the chemical language of the forest bed. Understand the everything that keeps happening beneath our feet.
(Obligatory but obviously: never eat random mushrooms you find!!)
3. I also found the faint beginnings of a poem:
A flock of white egrets land
Upon the brilliant green of the paddy fields
I believe there is a poem here.
I often find egrets landing in my poems!
Mangrove blue mushroom mycelium meets the flock of egrets flying over heads past forest roots living on the edge of things thought about and the rise of tidal forces continues to provide poetry.