Learning from forest ecosystems

Getting Beyond Other

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.

-Jelaluddin Rumi 1207-1273

Just a decade ago, a forest ecosystem study showed that a species of mycorrhiza* thought to be in mutualistic symbiosis with a specific species of fir, had a “relationship” with another forest species (birch). Scientists injected isotopes (tracers injected with a dye) into the firs. The tracers traveled from the fir trees down through their roots until they appeared in a web-like underground linked system with the firs’ associated mycorrhiza. This did not surprise the scientists: many species, including orchids have mutualistic relationships with different species of mychorizzia. The surprise for the scientists was that the firs’ mychorizzia appeared in neighboring stands of birch, but only those birches that were struggling. It is as if the firs had sent out their co-evolved mycorrhiza to assist the birches that were undergoing environmental stress.
This brings up the intriguing idea, central in many strains of Buddhist thought, that everything in the natural world is cognizant. This is not to say that all things are conscious, as we understand human beings to be conscious, but each species and every individual within those species, even down to the simplest of life forms, are cognizant: they are aware of their environment, and respond to it in a way informed by that awareness.
But this word awareness, too, might not be adequate to convey what is meant here. Awareness comes and goes: if we find we are aware of something in our environment, chances are that sometime in the past we were or sometime in the future will be not aware of that object, and this assumes already that we are separate from it. What if we, for the sake of argument, eliminated the concept environment? What if we considered that the notion of an environment that is outside or separate from ourselves is false?
Some semi-nomadic tribes in the Americas had no words in their languages for environment. Perhaps there is another way to conceive of our relation to the natural world: perhaps we needn’t see ourselves as essentially different and separate from our surroundings. If a species of fungus can “recognize” and go to the aid of something in an entirely different taxonomic rank, the notion of what is “other,” between different human individuals becomes suspect.
Other. What if there is no other? There is, at least momentarily, times when this seems true: In nature I can sometimes feel the world is whole and one. Once I removed a portion of duff from the forest floor and discovered the cobwebby tracings of mycorrhiza like some vast network linking an entire forest. And sometimes with women on retreat, with women in one room on a winter day telling stories, there is wholeness. Last month, I attended my third women’s retreat in Ashfield, and while most of the women are from our church, there is no requirement that they be so. Many of us recognize but do not know one another deeply, while others share long-lasting deep relationships with one another. It doesn’t seem to matter. Over the course of the weekend, we become like strands of mycorrhiza, reaching out and connecting, especially to those who are under stress. Our story threads, like mycelia, become entangled until we are woven whole. Or as one woman said, “it’s as if this room is full of hundreds of women” because in telling our stories we became our mothers and our mothers’ mothers. And when we reach across and meet, we are whole, we are healed.
I write looking out my kitchen window across my neighbor’s hayfield to woods’ edge. In the foreground, a line of battered trees testifies; seven old sugar maples, limbs bent at wrong angles like broken arms. Their fingers, which were raised to the sky, now brush across snowdrifts. It comforts me to imagine that less shattered trees at woods’ edge, those spruce, pine and hemlock that better weathered the ice storm, will be sending out roots with their underground threads of fuzzy white mycorrhizas beneath snow and stubble to the troubled maples, whose root masses, after the ice storm of 2008, now must exceed the size of their reduced canopies.
Somewhere in the middle of the field, invisible to me, they meet.

*mycorrhiza: a mutualistic symbiosis between plant and fungus, localized in a root or root-like structure, in which energy moves primarily from plant to fungus and inorganic resources move from fungus to plant" (Michael F. Allen, The Ecology of Mycorrhizae, Cambridge University Press, 1991).
For good information on “the source of all that is good” see: http://www.mykoweb.com/articles/Mycorrhizas_1.html


-Kate Kerivan