The Lessons of Mushrooms

I’ve been spending more time in the forest since the quarantine began. I live in an apartment complex that is in walking distance to a patch of woods that surrounds a local river, which is a great privilege I do not take for granted. It has been raining a lot this April and morels are in season for a little longer. So, I have been venturing to the woods at least once a week to look for them (and also to collect garlic mustard - an introduced species that grows like wild around here). Just walking and getting my body moving has been essential to my mental health.

Also, I have been working on creating a hidden section to this site to house some of my recipes that I have been creating under the name The Radish Room (Instagram, Facebook) since 2017. You can find the recipes here: katcoolahan.com/theradishroom. I am slowly typing up my handwritten notes and getting good photos of favorite meals to share with the world. One dish that has worked particularly well with foraged ingredients is my sunflower pesto recipe. I substitute garlic mustard for the basil and use that as a sauce for pasta, with chickpeas and sautéed peppers and morels.

Foraging brings me a lot of joy. The hours spent in the woods forgetting about the outside world, then the hours spent in the kitchen remembering nature. Getting low to the ground looking for mushrooms changes my perspective, helps me to better appreciate the smaller aspects of the forest and the interconnectedness of the ecosystem.

This pandemic has brought joy and purpose to the forefront of my consciousness in a big way. The joys in my life now “pop” with a new brilliance. Yes, there has been sadness and despair and anxiety too. But those also illuminate the joy in a way. Because when I contemplate how I want to spend my limited time here, writing and being in nature stand out more than ever. Both of these activities are ways that I connect: to other people and to the natural world. I value connection, networks, diversity. I am finding new ways to connect that I never considered before, like online writing classes and zoom calls.

In many ways, I feel life has prepared me in its own way for this global health crisis. I spent the greater part of my adult life studying edible plants and the patterns of nature, as well as mindfulness and healing techniques to deal with depression and anxiety. I trained in yoga and reiki, I learned to cook and how to eat really well at home. I have (for the most part) eased away from alcohol and others ways of numbing out to pain. I have lost many loved ones, including a parent and a parent-in-law. Just this last year, my spouse and I lost three family members within a few months of each another. The year 2019 was, by far, the hardest of my life so far … and then in 2020 we all get hit with a global pandemic. For much of this past year, I could not understand how that kind of compounding loss ever could serve me, how it could teach me anything other than that I needed to endure and just keep living when things felt utterly hopeless. With each death, though, I realize that my grief evolves a little. I have gotten better at accepting life’s impermanence and moving with (instead of fighting against) the current reality. This has also illuminated joy in my life. I can be more present with my life when I live in this acceptance. I am by no means perfect in grief. Not even close. Grief answers to no one and will do what it pleases, after all. But, I do feel more prepared than before to deal with whatever life will throw our way next. I do want to mention that I also have the incredible privilege in this pandemic of not being in survival mode, worrying about a paycheck or housing or groceries or any other basic needs. Although this would not have been the case for me for most of my adult life, which is mostly a matter of timing, I have had more mental space and bandwidth to process and think. As Yuval Noah Harari so aptly says, “thinking about the big picture is a relatively rare luxury.”

Most of my life, I also believed that I was flawed because I could never just be one thing … I worked many jobs across many fields (environmental, fundraising, accounting, retail) and cultivated deep interests in several areas (nature/science, writing/communication, wellness/healing). I almost never felt adequate in the world and often felt like a failure for not being able to just put my head down and commit. But, now, I am seeing clearly how these aspects of myself converge to serve me (and thus help to serve others). Now, more than ever, I know that I was not put here on earth for the status quo. I am here to help build something new. In these words is where my interests merge, art is where they come together.

Mushroom hunting is a lot like life in this way. Sometimes I need to be patient to wait for the lesson. I need to get down low to the ground and humble myself to change my perspective. There is a season for everything in life. When the season is over it is time to let go and begin something new.

An Ode to Climbing (and joy)

Recently, I have taken up the sport of bouldering. I’ve been thinking all week about what I’d like to write about for this Monday’s blog post and bouldering is just about the only thing I can think about these days. It is one of the greatest comforts and constants I have in my life now, in a time when many things are changing and a cross-country move this summer is looming in the background of everything.

In many ways, it feels like all roads have lead to bouldering. Sports and I have had a complicated relationship in the past. So, it took a while to get here.

I began playing (team) sports at a young age. First, I played soccer. Running up and down the field, breathless, always exhausted, praying for the coach to pull me. “Please, put me in time out. I just want to rest and hang out with my grandpa,” who came to almost every game. Next, was softball. I played softball for probably six years and was decent at the game until I hit puberty and became clumsy and self-conscious. I originally played shortstop and was a perfectly adequate batter. As I aged into a teenager, I was plopped into the outfield, right field, where balls would seldom fly. I was also the player for whom all the kids would groan when it was my time to bat. They knew, at bat, I often crumbled under the pressure of letting my team down. I played exactly one season of basketball. On this team, I arrived as a complete beginner to a team that had been playing for years. My teammates never passed the ball in a game, not once. For the whole season basketball seemed like just more endless running. Back and forth. Back and forth. Forever.

Sports in middle and high school looked akin to an endless void. I traded in those activities for drama and band and chorus. I had a strong disdain for any sport, really. In a lot of ways, I thought I would never play sports again of any kind. It wasn’t until college, ironically, when I was forced into taking physical education, that I practiced sports voluntarily. In college, I took classes in swimming in running and soon found myself running in 5k and 10k races, eventually completing a half-marathon and also dabbling in sprint triathlons.

I ran for several years after college before finding yoga and realizing that I actually hated running. Turns out I could get that elusive “runner’s high” from other more palatable activities. Now, yoga is hardly a sport. But, it did get me into my body in similar ways as sports intend to do and yoga was also the key that opened the door for me to try team sports again. Non-competitive sports like yoga and hiking helped me to feel strong, confident, and centered. So, when I was invited to play pickup games of sand volleyball with friends, I acquiesced and actually enjoyed myself.

I never considered I would get into climbing because of an intense fear of heights that I have carried since I was a small child. And yet, I fell instantly in love with it. I fell in love with the way it feels to have your whole body up against a wall, experiencing every muscle contract and work in unison to keep you from falling. With the fear of nearing the top, experiencing the room spin around you, heart thumping, mind racing and having no choice but to suck it up and find some way down. I fell in love with how, when you are in the gym surrounded by problems (bouldering routes are called problems), nothing else exists. It’s just you and your hands and feet and the wall. Your only job is to solve (send) the problems you are able to solve (and to save the ones you cannot until next time).

In a lot of ways, bouldering has become a metaphor for how I am striving to live my life. I desire to follow whatever lights me up inside: writing, climbing, spending time in nature. I spend a lot of time examining my fears about living a life I truly love. I realize I have no choice but to suck it up and find a way back to balance. I practice the art of knowing which problems are mine to solve. And I realize that sometimes things find you in the perfect time and it’s okay to get a little lost in that joy.