[Issue 2023.66]

‘Mycelial’, Lisa Timpf

Art © 2023 Dr T. Eratopo

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March 2023 Techspot headline: Scientists have developed
a ‘living PC’ made from mushrooms

At first, it seemed absurd,
mycelial motherboards in our computers.
But the notion grew on us, the way
shitakes take to oak. Burrow,
the new search engine, delivered connections
sans advertising or bias. “Ask the mushrooms”
became the stock suggestion
any time someone had a question.
Those fungi have their tendrils
in everything, a vast, pulsing, network,
lifeblood and lifeline of the world.

The mushrooms patched us through
to Mother Earth. She was hard to understand,
at first, having no vocabulary
for notions like greed and the fear of scarcity.
We saw her dimly, through our devices’ screens,
but as time passed, empathy grew easier,
and we sensed, beneath her words,
how the trees breathe, and caught
the scent of her favorite perfumes:
basswood in spring, and dried-up
pine needles baking in the summer sun.

We opened our doors to her,
let greenery twine through our home offices,
and one day we discovered
we didn’t need our computers any more.
We left our buildings made of the dead
and never-living, to make our homes
in moonlit glades, tending gardens
and sharing space amicably
with our woodland cohabitors and
feeling, in our rushing blood,
the pulse of all living things.

And the healing of the world began.

© 2023 Lisa Timpf

[Issue 2023.66]

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