learning how to wait

on growing mushrooms and trusting the invisible

“I got a drop for you.”

I already knew what it was. It could only be one thing.

“Be there in 12!”

I turned my phone off DND and switched on my ringer on for the first time in weeks. I couldn’t risk missing this call.

“I’m here.”

I put on my shoes and contemplated grabbing gloves but I was so excited and already halfway out the front door, I couldn’t be bothered with them. I spotted my friend digging in her trunk as I rushed over to help.

We carried four oak logs one at a time from the trunk to the back fence. The logs are heavy. Much heavier than I expected. In a few days, I’ll begin the process of inoculating them with mushroom spawn.

This method of log cultivation is long and uneventful. Once I plug them with spawn, the logs will sit here through winter, spring and into next summer. Maybe longer. There’s no way for me to check on them or know if it’s working. I just have to wait.

I’ve never been good at waiting.

I was blind to the world of fungi for most of my life.

I didn’t even know mushrooms were something you could grow. I thought they were all foraged from the wild except for those button mushrooms they sell in grocery stores. You know the ones. There’s nothing wrong with them, but there are over 2,000 species of edible mushrooms. I’m lucky if my local grocery stores have at least six different varieties.

One day I followed my curiosity down a YouTube rabbit hole and learned that unlike plants, fungi don’t compete for sunlight and water. They live in the margins. They take their time and do their best work in the dark. You can’t see what they’re doing until they decide to show you.

The science and mystery of fungi intrigued me.

I researched every way to grow mushrooms. Logs. Buckets. Bags. Blocks. Last spring at the Chicago Food and Justice Summit, I stumbled into a log cultivation workshop hosted by Patchwork Farms.

I took it as a sign.

Here’s what happens when you inoculate a log:

You drill holes around a log in a diamond pattern, hammer in spawn plugs (little wooden dowels colonized with mycelium) and seal each hole with wax to keep contaminants out. Then you stack the logs in a shaded spot and leave them to do their mysterious work.

For months, nothing visible happens. But inside the log, mycelium is spreading. Breaking down lignin. Turning dead tissue into a living network. And then one day shiitake mushrooms will emerge as proof of invisible work that had been happening the whole time.

When I look at the mysteries and illegibilities of fungi, I can relate. Learning about them has taught me to dwell more comfortably in mystery, even as I pursue answers and better questions.

-Maria Pinto, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless

I recognize myself in fungi. I work the same way. My ideas colonizing beneath the surface through conversations with my spirit family happening in the dark. And then one day, something fruits, seemingly out of nowhere.

For me, creativity is a conversation with my spirit family. A conversation that’s mostly happening subconsciously, beneath the surface, in the dark, while I’m doing other things. The only glimpses I get are through scribbled journal entries and hours of daydreaming. Moments where I catch a thread of what’s moving through me.

It’s hard to explain to everyone else because this work is often elusive, even to me.

I see this pattern everywhere now. In my writing, how I build relationships and how I’m building Voyage.

When I started dreaming up the farm, I was in a rush to feel successful. I wanted visible proof every time someone asked how it was going. Harvest photos. Pounds of vegetables. Something I could post, something I could measure, something concrete I could point to and say see, it’s working.

But I’m not there yet.

Most of what I do right now looks like nothing.

I stand in the yard staring at shadows. I sketch layouts that keep changing. I move dirt from one place to another and back again. I sit on the porch with coffee, watching how light moves across the fence.

Sometimes I imagine how, to someone watching, it probably looks like I’m wasting time. But this is what listening looks like. I can hear the land, my spirit family, and the mycelium spreading beneath my awareness, building something I won’t understand until it fruits.

My ideas are cultivating. They crave more time in the dark. More decomposition. More invisible work that even I don’t fully understand.

I’m learning to trust that. Uncomfortable as it is.

...like fungi, the stuff I’m made of (that we’re all made of) has the power to move in darkness, to thrive undetected, to quietly work until such a time as there’s nothing left to do but fruit.

-Maria Pinto, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless

These logs will sit in the shade behind my greenhouses.

Mycelium will spread where I can’t see it, track it or measure it. Reminding me that some of the most important work happens in the dark, illegible even to the person doing it.

I’ve never been good at waiting. But I trust that when they’re ready to fruit, they will.

read with me

If you enjoyed those beautiful snippets of Maria Pinto’s Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless. I invite you into deep study of this work with ImaginationDoulas this spring.

what to expect

• weekly intimate discussions, hosted virtually

• a personal study guide with reflections, practices and rituals

• a community to dream with