#many funky creepy crawlies around lately

[switch]

saw a weird bug in the dark out of the corner of my eye, briefly thought it might have been a small solifuge and got excited. it was just a jerusalem cricket. first one i’ve seen as an adult.

[tropicaldruid]

Mushrooms and the magic of decay

Many times when mushrooms are discussed in a magical sense, the topic is tied into psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. However mushrooms, psychedelic and mundane, edible and bane, all work a completely different magic altogether completely separate from their utility to us: Decay.

There are a plethora of Gods and Cults of Decay to be found in fantasy media, Namira from the Elder Scrolls franchise and the Golgari Swarm of MTG and now DND spring to mind. I haven’t found much in the way of real world mystery cults or deities, but it does deeply fascinate me as a topic.

Mushrooms, molds, other fungi, slimes, worms, beetles, all those little creepy funky smelling things that devour the dead to make way for new life. I love em. I love getting to work closely alongside them and watch them as they do their thing. Turning the refuse, the corpses of the invasive plants we are clearing from the swamp into food and fertilizers. It’s magic.

While I was out working on starting these new spores in the swamp and meditating, I got to thinking about decay as a part of the life cycle. All of these creepy crawlies work in the forests and landfills and dumpsters clearing away the clutter of existence, eating the otherwise useless and obsolete and turning it into fuel, food, fertilizer and more. 

A tree branch falls to the forest floor during a storm, and within months it is home to millions of organisms, and within a year or two it is reduced to loam, fertilizing the roots of a beautyberry shrub, which reinforce the topsoil layer and keep the wind from eroding the loose sand just below.  When invasive plants overtake an area, the biodiversity of the fauna drastically drops, there are fewer creepy crawlies to devour the dead. The whole balance gets thrown off and the forest gets choked out with unsustainable growth that doesn’t decay and make way for the new. It acts as a mulch until another invasive grows over top of it. (I’ll rant more about this later, I have an entire post about invasives coming.)

^^Yeah, it’s pretty but it’s killing the swamp.

It gave me an appreciation for the work I’ve been doing on myself personally. So much of my growth lately is a direct result of allowing obsolete ideas and practices to finally decay and make room for something new. I’d been carrying around values, fears, priorities for a decade that no longer suited me and it was consuming me. I had to deprogram and declutter myself before I could finally start walking a new path. I’ll be expanding more on that in a series of upcoming posts I’m calling The Survivor’s Guide to Leaving Your Birth Religion. Stay tuned for more. That’s about all for now, Blessings Y’all! Enjoy this bonus pic of a Beautyberry.