Oh to Hold Hands Like the Honey Fungus

By Luisa A. Igloria on July 24, 2024

~ with lines from Rebecca Solnit and Ross Gay

Zeitgeist, that defining spirit of a particular time in history—
a mood that seeps into the smallest particle of the everyday.
You don't understand why everyone is always surly, or why there are
bans on books that show life's real complexity (beauty & horror, hurt & hope).
Xenophobia comes riding back into the streets in full view, spitting & swinging its fists.
Climate these days is more than weather. The oceans are bleached & acidic,
warming at an alarming rate. Fires raze the hills in summer, floods drench the plains.
Do you have recurring migraines from doomscrolling as much as dehydration,
vasoconstriction, a caffeine addiction? You're not alone. Roughly 301 million have anxiety,
externalization of historical & personal trauma, paralyzing fear... So much cortisol
unsettling the system, leaked from tricorn hats that sit atop the kidneys. What,
foreseeably, is there to look forward to? Solnit says it's Not Too Late. Ross Gay says
The trees & the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the under-
ground union between us... Lose heart, take heart, lose heart, take heart again.
Some days you just want to survive. Some days you want to die, swiftly if possible.
Helplessness or frank despair. Then there are days you say Damn it, I'm tired of always
reconsidering before you give in to the smallest pleasure; or even the right to express
indignation & outrage at the apparent daily loss of collective conscience, at highly
questionable distortions of the law. How did the world become funhouse, Comic-Con for
jingoists wielding flags & battering rams? Beneath the soil, networks of glowing fungi
perform the sustaining interconnectedness we desire. The largest organism on earth at 8.9
kilometers or 2,200 acres in Oregon is the honey fungus—it's been around, defying
oblivion even after almost 9,000 years. To persist past prophecies of eternal
loneliness, perpetual hand-wringing, complete extinction—wouldn't that be something?
Not naive but active hope: What if we joined our sorrows... What if that is joy?
May we look deeply at our sorrows, then; may we see them in each other.