Mycorrhizal memories / Ardhanari

Reflections on interconnection, trees and fungi, and the hermaphroditic equinox deity.

Autumn has always been my favorite season. I know, it’s cliche, but something in my soul truly awakens when I’m in a part of the world that crosses this threshold at this time of year. It’s like the life cycle in miniature, watching the green landscape briefly, brilliantly illuminated in a flash of reds and golds before preserving itself in amber, bracing for the winter chill. The preparation for hibernation, where the consensus world even more briefly agrees that these rules we’ve created are illusory and can be dropped; where for just a moment, we align with the rhythms and invitations of the planet; the game stops, and nothing is expected of us but to just be.

Yet even helpful transitions often bring challenges. The Autumn Equinox has always been a harbinger of not only harvest and celebration, but death and endings, the winter fallow just past the horizon of abundance. Traditionally, it’s when humans, too, preserve what they want to take with them into the cold: canning, pickling, fermenting, bottling, the entombed remains of summer’s bounty; survival food, snapshots of sunnier moments frozen in time.

And so, as we preserve our edible memories and summer fantasies, idyllic holiday moments and unmet promises of rest, many of us get nostalgic and yearn to nest as the cold sets in. Maybe the sensory intensity of autumn sparks an equal and opposite reaction, a longing for the times that have heightened in hindsight; perhaps the ecstasy of the season’s delights beg to be shared, painful unless observed together.

Observation, that elusive phenomenon. Do we even exist without someone else watching? There is a human need to be seen. Perhaps the trees feel it, too, and it’s why they put on such a show. It is said, after all, that the trees and fungi keep the whole system running, going to elaborate lengths to attract our attention and keep us propagating them.

I keep hearing, whenever I pass through the death-stillness of a cemetery park in London, where roots and bones and ivy and branches and sinew and leaves and flesh are all one: We used to be trees.

If that’s true, maybe the longing we feel this time of year is for the leaves we can’t light up anymore. Maybe it’s the bittersweet separation from our arboreal companions, that divine ache that celebrates our being briefly discrete; the beauty that comes from experiencing the universe as different things, but that means we are not one with the divine anymore, and may never, til death or enlightenment, feel completely whole.

Equinox was last weekend: the day of equal lightness and dark, when the world is closest to restoring itself to holy equilibrium, and that was certainly how I experienced it. I discovered that there is a trans* character in Hinduism: Ardhanari, the Hindu Hermes, a holy Hermaphrodite; the third thing created when Shiva, the masc energy, merges with the femme, Shakhti. The Equinox is said to be the day that honors Ardhanari—when the polarities are perfectly balanced. And I believe trans* and queer are larger archetypes that encompass all of us who feel we don’t fit the neuro- mono- gender- hetero-norm.

Balance feels illusory to so many of us under this umbrella (small wonder, with images like this in the culture: when you google the name of this deity, the first result is an Indian horror movie about a murderous trans person)—but this is our true essence.

Image credit: Unknown author - https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1940-0713-0-79, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12813191

Equinox is also a time of endings and completions, mourning and releasing. For me, there are many versions of self dying who need to be grieved. I’m mourning not just the selves but the people, seasons, places, and stories that came with them, including being a woman. I will always choose and champion freedom and truth over comfort, but I can’t lie: I miss the illusion of certainty sometimes; of having some things that didn’t change, like my gender or name, both foundations that are crumbling. The journalist is also dying; the trans queer artist named Riordan who has lain dormant for so long is rising, my true self is returning, but that doesn’t mean these others aren’t losses. The parts served their purpose, and must be paid their propers.

The new beginning is joyful and freeing, but damn. It hurts as they are leaving.

I miss when the whole world felt simpler sometimes, the amount of information on the planet is doubling every two years, there’s way too much to keep up with, and I feel perpetually underwater, desperately paddling as my head dips under. Everything is so complicated, I sometimes miss when phones were analog and you couldn’t use it at the same time as the internet dial-up, which was so slow and small it wasn’t much better than an encyclopedia. Yet some of my life’s most incredible and healing connective moments would never have been possible without these innovations.

Is it worth the trade off? There probably isn’t an answer. But I know that perhaps the most contented I’ve ever been in my life was when I worked on a few permaculture farms in Greece and didn’t even open my computer.

All of this, too, while this body is aging and changing. I am forced to adjust to a world of slower pace that’s anathema to my training, one of chronic pain and my almost-40 age; not able to run around like I used to, tired more often and easily; spending more and more time just sitting in silence, staring out the window at the trees we used to be.

The roots of trees form mycorrhizal relationships with fungi, living symbiotically, and trees, plants, and fungi have hermaphroditic species that fall along a huge and diverse gender spectrum—the Splitgill mushroom is a queer icon for boasting 23,000—reflecting how limited are our conceptions of things. If the so-called complex organism of the human body really only had two genders, how could we be considered evolution? I think we contain multitudes more than we’ve been told or appear to on the surface, the influence of culture running broader and deeper than we realize or admit. What’s more, our ancient, wise ancestors propagate through all kinds of kinky, creative means, including self-replicating. Yet even these involve embedded symbiosis with the ecosystem: solo poly, forming partnerships.

Beautiful farmer’s market mushrooms I’ve forgotten the name of, which form mycorrhizal relationships with birch trees.

I miss intimacy, and I’ve been avoiding it, because it scares me more than broken bones, healing work, or harrowing travel. But I feel a different kind of longing now, not just for what was or could have been. I want someone to love me again, and I want to love them, like for real, be in love again. I want to stop feeling like the minotaur, locked up in its lair, bashing its horns into the walls in the darkness, making a big fucking mess out of everything; always apologizing.

Sometimes I miss when my life revolved around getting beers and hosting dinner nights with friends; when I almost let myself love those women, but wasn’t ready yet. I miss going to my coworking spot and drawing club at the pub and hosting events with my partner that taught people where the things they ate and drank came from, making something ephemeral and connective together; putting on a show. It felt so wholesome and heartfelt and homespun, sweet and tender in a way I didn’t realize I could experience outside of being a kid, connecting with animals, or maybe with my ex-partner when we were birdwatching or caring for our bunny.

So I guess that was the point, to show me it was possible.

My soul called, and I had to take that one, and the phone has rarely stopped ringing since. It’s all clearly what’s supposed to happen, and I’m genuinely excited for what’s next. I’m ready both to fly and build another nest in a place that has always felt like home in a deeper sense. But it can be both things.

Does it hurt the trees when their leaves start falling?

Memories encased in amber, preserved in our nervous systems. Everything, in the end, is only here for a season; it will flare brilliantly and fade away, and then something else will happen. But we’ll hold that flame in our hearts, imprinted on our veins like roots.