Mushrooms make me happy. They are weird and wonderful, a little creepy and almost alien, and for reasons I cannot put into words, I find looking at them strangely satisfying and thrilling. Existing most of the time as invisible (to us) filaments in the Plutonian Underworld of the soil, they poke their fruiting bodies into our world suddenly, briefly, and so very dramatically.

I love their radial symmetry, their subtle and rich earth tones, the way they pop straight out of dead wood or push their way up through the litter of the forest floor, their perfection of form tweaked and sculpted by the forest around them. They have some characteristics of plants and some of animals, and hold something of magic and fantasy and science fiction. Even the disgusting slime molds on their slow march across the ground have to be appreciated (though if they were larger they would be scary), as the forest could not exist without the fungi that comprise the very bottom link in the food chain, recycling the dead plant matter into food for new life.

I very much enjoy eating mushrooms too, but with a healthy fear of being poisoned, and a dis-inclination to eat bugs, there are relatively few that I actually take home and cook. For the most part I just enjoy looking at the wild ones, and feed myself on the safely farmed varieties.

There is little that makes me happier than being out in the woods when they are saturated with rain and the mushrooms are blooming, except perhaps when I am out there at that time with my digital camera and can bring them home with me and share them with others. Perhaps someday I will get around to classifying and labeling my fungal friends, but that's much less important to me than just appreciating their odd beauty. Hope you enjoy it too!