Pulling Rabbits out of the Mycelium Network

Aside from chasing deliveries out of wormholes, the past couple days have been very unbusy. I’m not used to that. I’ve been walking on eggshells and navigating rugs coming out from under me and trying to pull rabbits out of hats for months. Really, I’ve been doing it since I pulled up my unintentional roots ten years ago.

There’s been large personal problems and health crises… housing issues… crackheads and thieves and right wing extremists and Jamaican mafia and Obeah women and Peruvian shamen and cult leaders… and simple things like the current logistics of moving a gypsy life into an apartment. And I wouldn’t trade it all for anything, because the good parts — people and stories and experiences — still outweigh the negatives by far.

There were a couple places I thought I’d stay a while, and there were chunks of time gypsying that were working relatively alright, and were so good. Sometimes I thought life was going to be stable for a while during that time, even if unrootedly, and always I was grounded partly by my belief that someday there was a sailboat in my future.

I don’t know where things go from here. The boat dream is gone, and I do have to stay put and heal and sort some things out, but I’m still a gypsy… and this past couple of unbusy days have let me realize how much this move, and this apartment, scare me.

It’s not just concern about the place not working out, because so much hasn’t for many months, or even about settling itchy feet. I’m terrified of getting stuck. Of getting complacent. Of my days being centred on just getting by and managing immediate things. Of being a broken cog in a broken machine, an inflamed appendix in the organism of the ecosystem.

Staying in touch online is making the internet like a mycelium network for me. It’s keeping me alive. And that, these past couple days, it’s helping me accept that I need to stay put a while, and to hope it will help me learn to float again.

Like the mycelium connecting life on this planet, our human networks need trees and rocks as much as water. Belief systems and ways of being around the Earth reflect the knowledge that even trees and boulders can move. That’s become wound into our mythologies, our history, our cultures. Treesisters bind the Earth’s wounds with mangroves, dryads fall in love with naiads, Ents walk into rivers, mountains become beaches that drift into the sea, continents drift and split….

They don’t stop. They pause, but they are always a crucial and active part of everything. Their relative stability has purpose.

If I can’t believe in my own, I can believe in that.

Rolling stones may not gather moss, but they gather spores, and then they spread them.

The network keeps the planet alive, water and air and rocks and trees following the connections.

I’ll keep trying to follow mine, and that somehow, all of us doing that contributes to the wellness wholeness of the network keeping this beautiful struggling planet alive.

With love and — because of you — maybe a little hope for something better,

Ann