Underground Lovers – Encounters with Fungi by Alison Pouliot

January 5, 2025 – Northcote

I'm trying to get off Instagram. Facebook too, ideally, although there still feels like too many people I am only connected to on these platforms that I might regret being more disconnected from. I want less time on the algorithm of banality rectangle and now time reading books and looking at wild and rare mushrooms.

I read this in a cabin in Romsey, stopping every now and then for a trip to a little town, lighting a fire or a hike through the bush on the property. I also found myself pausing to look up photos of the fungi mentioned in this book, getting distracted by things like frog songs or watching the local kangaroos and cockatoos and kookaburras.

This book made me realise I should have gone on the three hour guided hike in winter where someone shows you all sorts of amazing fungi growing in the wild in rural Victoria .It made me think about seeing the world through the eyes of someone who loves fungi, and nature, and science and biology and conservation. It got me thinking about being more in nature more often, to look at fluorescent mushrooms and listen to birds and admire trees.

It got me curious about aesthetic ethics and how they apply to conservation and biodiversity preservation.

It had me feeling like a small dot on a big earth where my life is but one of many.

There's a line of interest in my reading from Ways of Being to The Overstory to this that feels like it also reaches back to stuff I liked when I was younger, more experimental things, something in all of this that questions at the edges of the human experience, encouraging me away from linear, static, singular, traditional worldviews and towards collective, diverse, holistic, asymmetrical, rhizomic experiences.

Perhaps not coincidentally I'm having an ongoing existential crisis with intrusive thoughts of mortality recently. Probably unrelated.

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