The following was a 7 minute free write based on a prompt from one of the guerilla writers. Very minimally tweaked, so it’s pretty much as it was when I shared it. It was fun and relaxed and the words just happened. While the prompt was something else entirely, I wanted to share an image to go along with this piece as we found mushrooms growing in our garden. Sprung up at the base of one of our baby hedge. It was an exciting discovery. They’re still there, by the way.

Falling down to the ground, the earth subsuming the body, taking the all that is me and I am taken down into the roots, into the deep, into the soft, mushy loam where the body, like compost becomes food and home for growing things, for mushroom and mold, for creeping and crawling things and all that earth needs in order to grow. 

Here, in the hollow of my chest, grow you, fungi. Spread through my veins, the springing out lines and roots of you, spreading and flowing from fingers where flesh melts away to soft mush, to become part and parcel of the network.

Burrowing in the hollows and the crevices of my skull, peek through the sockets where eye flesh once was. See and know the world as seen and known by you who creep and crawl about beneath the roots of trees and grasses and the world above.

I sink beneath to where there is no partition between you and I, where the border between my flesh and earth’s flesh is no more.

I become, mulch and fertilizer, part of the network, one with the spores floating and flying on the air, blown about to various places where there are other bodies too. Simply waiting to be found, to be called, to be summoned.

Come.

I join my voice to the voice of the spores, to the summoning of the moldy leaves and the comforting chill of earth.

Come, we say.

Be with us. Be down under the roots. Be food for earth, for trees, for plants for fungi, for mold, for all that creeps and crawls. In surrendering to decay, be life.