When I was growing up, I loved going out into the woods in the spring, looking down.
I was hunting morels, those delicious wild mushrooms that grow around old logs, in moist, rotten places that smell like damp soil, like mother earth, like tasty life.
They are the mycorrhiza, and they have a narrative.
The morel, the mycorrhizae, is a fungus that grows in association with the roots of a plant in a symbiotic or mildly pathogenic relationship.
Sounds like family.
Sounds like my family.
I well remember the warm, damp soil in which my parent and I and my brothers and I wove our roots together. It was good, symbiotic, mutually beneficial. I remember happily playing baseball with my brothers, quietly reading with my mom, going water skiing with my dad and brothers.
It was good!
It was also not always good.
Sometime it was competitive, combative, mildly pathogenic. I remember competing for the baseball win with my brothers, fighting down on the ground with them, arguing in the evening with my mom, being — in my mind — wrongfully and shamefully disciplined by my dad.
So looking back, which was it, my family?
Was it symbiotic and mutualistic or was it pathogenic and mildly harmful?
It was both.
It always is.
At an earlier and more naive stage of life, I thought relationships were one thing only, and stayed the same. I thought love was love.
It isn’t and they don’t — the relationships — remain the same. Relationships morph. Competition and jealousy and hurt sometime carry the day. We change. Over time we realize we are different. We bring some harm and some distance to each other. We unwittingly compete for the big thing — for love.
I love my family — they are some good people — but some of the relationships have slightly rotten edges. They still exist as good, and as tasty, but also as mildly pathogenic.
Life — it’s not one thing. It’s a bit of a fungal narrative.
Thrive! 