Feeling washed out as the footbridge across Hoyle Creek Tributary. Its sand banks are slippery and soft, so the dog and I inch down to cross the slow flow that had just recently flooded. Mushrooms dot the forest floor from recent rain, all colors of them: white, orange, rust, yellow, red. The white ones are the most abundant. Some mushrooms have no caps, only stems, a white squiggle like the ghost of a mushroom or like coral on the ocean floor. Some mushrooms sit squat and low, their stems fatter than their caps. One has a disgruntled skirt like it’s Cinderella stuck at midnight transformation. Puhpowee. Yes, the Anishinaabe word for “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight” (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 49). The forest’s invisible forces.
A white-tailed doe stops in the brush she hides in as we pass three yards from her. How much of a threat is woman-and-dog to her? A little farther along, a woman with cap and hiking stick exclaims to me the beauty of the fungi as we pass each other. We’re heading the same way so I am sure to step on twigs and break them beneath my feet to warn her of our approach, before calling out a hello. I know the danger of being a woman alone in the woods, and it’s not the wild animals I fear, animals who likely fear us more than we do them. I am grateful once again for my dog’s presence.
I’m thinking about the woman Michael and I met last night at the town Bocce tournament who said she and her husband live on 18 acres on a mountain. Someone asked her if they do anything with the land. She said it’s mostly woods. I ponder the person’s question; must one do something with woods? What is the woods? What am I inside of now as I walk through a wood? What am I inside of that has the force to press mushrooms up from the earth overnight—puhpowee? Why do we have to do something with land, and why do we call it wasted when we don’t? We press on, follow the trail carved around trees and over streams.
I’m thinking about the difference between religious dogma and practice. What is it to have both? What does the practice show? My yoga practice has no dogma, only the practice of yoking inner with outer, my body with the silent void that is all of me, that eternal divine center that each one of us is. My religion is poetry and my dogmagic is to break the rules well. Perhaps I am one of the organs of this forest, as the mushroom is an organ of the wood. We are sisters. Perhaps what I am inside of is what’s inside of me.