The last winter I spent in New Mexico, I walked to the river every morning in the pre-dawn hour. No matter how much the wind would howl later on, at this time of the day, nothing stirred besides the birds. Because I traveled the same path every morning, circling round one wetland I would find myself slipping into a light trance as my feet hit the hard unforgiving ground.

Every bush, cottonwood, Russian olive, juniper was familiar, each was a friend. Although this wetland had been trimmed and paths mowed, the majority of trees, plants, and native grasses had been left intact and the river flowed nearby. During these light trance states, I sensed that the ground beneath my feet was pulsing, that the earth was trying to communicate with me.

At that time I didn’t know that I was walking over the skin of mycelium, because I didn’t know whether these networks extended throughout the desert. But I felt or sensed something. I knew from trying to garden in NM that the surface of the ground, (hardpan) seemed quite barren except for excess minerals deposits.

I did find evidence of decay in rotting bark that lay under some cottonwoods that I used as mulch, but I saw nothing that resembled any kind of connected network.

Later I learned that across arid soils, a thin crust can form within the top few centimeters of the soil as long as that surface is not disturbed. If the land is run over by people, cattle, four-wheelers, mined, or otherwise disfigured, that precious skin will disappear.

It takes hundreds or thousands of years to replace this layer of living matter, especially in a desert, although mycelial networks are easily destroyed anywhere.

If the desert mantle is intact, microscopic and macroscopic fungi and algae live together in a symbiotic relationship. Whenever it rains, cyanobacteria, formerly called blue-green algae, bacteria, fungi, and other microbes that have been dormant awaken.

Freed from drought, these microscopic creatures start making food and creating miniature tunnels as they move through the soil, reproducing as long as the soil is moist. The mucilage around algae filaments keeps in the moisture that the organisms need to thrive.

As the soil dries out after a rain, the threads of mycelium tightly bind all the soil grains, gluing soil particles together against wind and erosion. The mycelial fungal threads or hyphae communicate, grow every which way, exchange water and nutrients, and store carbon underground.

Fungal networks are the foundation of all life on earth. Somewhere around 350 to 250 billion years ago, alga probably met fungus as it crept out of the sea (some controversy surrounds this – the newest research suggests that mosses are older by roughly 150 billion years, but they also began in the sea as green algae).

Algae could photosynthesize but it needed fungi to break down nutrients like minerals from rock. The two developed a mutualistic partnership that still exists today. Between the two, they create the soil that supports all terrestrial life.

In temperate forests like ours here in Maine, billions of symbiotic mycorrhizal mycelial networks are quite visible, often tucked under leaves or threading their way through the surface of the forest floor. Uncover a few dead leaves and you will find these threads, some are patterned like trees or sunbursts – all are beautiful.

I try to imagine the billions of mycelium that are running under my feet as I walk into my field through the pines, or step across the brook into the cool hemlock forest that is carpeted with a plethora of emerald mosses, princess pine, pyrola, and other spring ephemerals.

I experience awe as I remind myself that all these underground threads are exchanging information, carbon, water, and other nutrients with one another. What we have learned is that although competition exists in every forest, cooperation between species is the norm. Trees even favor their own kin (Dr. Suzanne Simard).

Most important and worth repeating is that during this time of climate change, stabilized mycelium stores masses of carbon – about 70 percent underground.

Harvard’s acclaimed author and naturalist, Terry Tempest Williams, tells a story about a friend of hers, a hard-core biologist who regularly runs through a grove of redwoods. One day she heard a voice say “we are suffering; we are dying. Can you hear us?”

The woman heard the voice three times while she was running and thought she was going mad. But because she was a biologist (who most certainly did not believe that trees conversed out loud) she had studies done on the grove of redwoods.

What scientists discovered was that those redwoods were dying. Why? Because their shallow roots couldn’t breathe under the feet of so many people that used those paths for ‘recreation’ and ‘amusement’.

Too much foot traffic destroys our forests by way of their Mycelial root systems.

I notice that the cold white blanket that separates me from this pulsing earth in the winter is not something I appreciate indefinitely; winter used to be a time I loved to snowshoe, look for tracks, and watch wild animals.

I still treasure the season, but not the freeze-thaw snow-ice winters of late, although I value snow as a form of protection for plants and tree roots, as well as a source of some water (it takes 12 inches of snow to equal one inch of water).

I have no desire to fly over the snow like a skier or whiz by on some machine; instead, I want to sink myself into earth’s bodily wholeness and this is hard to do with ice underfoot.

Last summer was wet and the best mushroom year I ever remember. I spent the entire season in the forest looking for/identifying/and studying the ecological niches that abounded with mushrooms, the fruiting bodies of some mycelium.

There are billions, trillions of mycelium that make up these underground networks but only about twenty thousand kinds of mushrooms in all.

I noted with excitement that in my favorite forest, I sometimes experienced that sensation of pulsing light while standing, walking slowly, or getting on my knees to inspect a plant or mushroom more closely. Reflecting upon this strange phenomenon, it seemed to me that unconsciously, I had shifted my awareness from thinking mind to sensing body.

After all, it was my body that experienced the pulsing and sensed or felt the light. I had learned by then that mycelial communication occurs by electrical impulses/electrolytes that emit sparks of light, and on some level, I apparently could sense this pulse emanating through my feet just as I had in the desert wetland. Amazing.

Today, I think of this vast mycelial network as a primal earth mother, a sentient being that lives under my feet and stretches across the surface of the earth in places where it has not been damaged. I think this ancient and infinitely wise earth mantle is trying to get our attention.

It is intriguing to see pictures of mycelium and the neural pathways of the brain because visually they seem to share similarities. Perhaps these mycelial networks are the mind of the earth reminding us that we need to re-learn from nature that interconnection and cooperation will help us save our species.

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