Cinnabar Polypores: Mercurial Rites of Passage & the Womb of Death
Without death and decay we would not have the world we are a part of, today. Consider that next time you feel your current shape and form slowly liquifying. Death’s digestive juices just might be...
“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here… Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.” —Rilke
Wandering within and amongst the towering pine, their sweet vanilla bark luring my hungry body to partake of their aroma, the crisp air slipped its sharp fingers through my pants playfully poking at my skin. I was wandering the forest with my mom, and our every step contributed to the composting of a densely packed pine needle floor. Crunching them apart, the sounds of decay intersected with our visual field as our eyes caressed the wintering land.
While my eyes were reaching peripherally and slightly up, hers descended down in excitement.
“Wow! Look at them!” She’d spotted five mushrooming beings gripped like muscles to a fallen and rotting pine limb. They were a fiery and rich orange-red - their rusty vibrance stood out amongst the deep and varying shades of brown and black.
We both crouched low, delighted by their colorful contrast. My hand instinctively reached for their coniferous host, my senses wanting an even closer look.
We were entranced, entangled by an erotic, mycelial spell cast by the porous, red underbelly of fruiting bodies. A spirited reminder of all the ways death feeds life, and, in this case, how life feeds upon death.
After leaving these scarlet temptresses where they lay, I followed the impulse of my wonder and made my way through texts to learn a bit more about them. Named after the mercurial mineral cinnabar, this eponymous shelf fungus is a saprophytic, white-rot decomposer. Them be a lot of words! Essentially, they derive nutrition from dead and decaying organic matter through the release of digestive juices. A conversion happens - what was once solid begins to liquify, and said liquid is slurped up by the fungus. A little reminiscent of spiders, wouldn’t you say?!
Cinnabar, the mineral for whom this polypore is named after, is one of the largest natural sources of mercury. Alchemically speaking, mercury’s elemental powers lived in its perceived ability to shift between life and death. At room temperature, this mineral liquifies into a silver, amniotic substance, giving credence to its more ancient association with the cosmic womb. The place from which all life emerges, and the place to which all of life returns.
I love mushrooms. They are one of humanity’s most illustrious and ancient elders. Our very existence is made possible because of them. They are humbling teachers, gathering up our trembling bodies through their tentacular embrace, decomposing the stories that guide our loving and living. As collaborative agents, they are instrumental in the re-imagining of Gaian futures. Fungal god/desses bridging the conceptual division struck, not too long ago, between death and birth.
Through them we are re-intimated with the necessity of endings. Through them we bear witness to the ways life bursts forth from the womb of death & decay. Not only is this applicable to the embodied articulations of matter and ecology, but also to the stretches of our personal & collective psycho-spiritual r/evolutions.
In order for us to live, and live fully, at that, we must remember how to die, and come to see how our death feeds our life and the lives of others.
Lives and deaths weaving a grand story that seems to never end, “merely” shapeshift.
We are all moved and in-formed by personal & collective narratives. Stories that guide the ways we are in relationship with ourselves and the world. By story, I am not referring to something abstracted and detached from our raw and real becomings & endings. For me, stories are living ecologies of wonder and possibility. They are ensouled places of creation and destruction that fruit bodies made of trans-specied, multi-ancestral, interstitial becomings that spring from the great primordial un/worldings of celestial wombs and Gaian tombs.
Much in the way love holds the promise of grief, life holds the promise of death. Or, put another way, death is pregnant with the promise of life. “Promises” as futuristic dreams woven into the webwork of time. Possibilities that reside in the mystery of every inter-dependent life.
Each of us, human & more-than-human, seen & unseen, is capable of extraordinary participation of which no amount of accolades or celebrity could ever convey. No, the kind of extraordinary I’m speaking of lives in our daily gestures of awe and amazement, in our shaky and reluctant submissions to change, in our despair of yet another day, in the synchronicities that catalyze and confirm our transformations, and in our exuberant celebration and deafening terror of simply being alive.
Without death and decay we would not have the world we are a part of, today. Consider that next time you feel your current shape and form slowly liquifying. Death’s digestive juices just might be breaking you down as food for some other wondrous articulation of life.
Upcoming Offering
Join myself & four other guides this coming Friday, Saturday & Sunday for the mythic, year-end journey Honor Your Worth - November 18, 19 & 20. During this 3-day offering I’ll be diving into the terrain of transformation and ensouled participation from our places of deep knowing.
My session, Magmatic Becomings: The Alchemy of Deep Knowing & Embodied Re-membrance is Day 2 of this rich 3-day course.
To Learn More & Register, CLICK HERE.