Dark corridors

For the past few years, I’ve thought of this time of year as a lightless tunnel: from late April, when my mother died in pain, till Mother’s Day, after which grief shrinks back to a manageable size. This year, I see my sister suffering through this passage, but somehow I’m okay.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been traversing a tunnel of physical pain. The “Fermentations” conference in Madrid bubbled over with good company and unexpected connections, but it was also hard to get around that big, lively city during a sciatica flare. I tended to have a few good hours midday when we’d explore, but by late afternoon I had to park myself back at the rental to stretch and rest. Then my throat got scratchy on the plane ride home, so I’ve also been recovering from a mild cold. I’d like to blame the coughing and sneezing of the unmasked guy in the seat behind me (at one point I actually heard him croak, “I’m dying”), but I suspect I was already coming down with it. Shoulda brought my reishi mushroom supplements to Spain…

On April 30, though, I felt like I walked into the light again, as the sciatica calmed and the cold faded out. It reminded me of emerging from serious depression, an experience I’ve had the bad and good fortune to undergo several times. Suddenly you look around and think, oh, I’m better, and only then realize how not-there you were for weeks. Madrid scenes that stay with me were relatively free from hurt: talking to an avidly interested and very lovely group of students after giving a conference keynote about fungi and Mycocosmic; a long lunch at an outdoor cafe with Chris involving salmorejo and a fino sherry spritz; then another extended meal in a mountain village with fellow conference-goers, while their kids ran around on the patio, after a tour and tasting at Maltman Brewery. (Hmm, fermented painkillers were definitely part of the magic.) A few snaps are below testifying that I actually have been talking up a storm, even if what I said is now kind of fuzzy.

It wasn’t the easiest trip, given the sciatica, but in other ways the timing was lucky, as in escaping Spain right before the big blackout. And while I could have used more energy during this first week of spring classes, my verve is perking back up as I need it for more barding around with this new book that is so much about my mother’s death as well as mycelium and other occult life. I just recorded a podcast with The Mushroom Hour; I will read at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville on Sunday 5/4 (live and hybrid, sign up here); I’m joining the always virtual Wild and Precious Life series this Wednesday 5/7; and I’ll be in Baltimore for the Hot L series at Ivy Bookstore on 5/11. That last is Mother’s Day. I wonder if I’ve just delayed the seasonal sadness, or whether I’m genuinely healing from mother-loss, too?

Big griefs never leave you, but they can transmute. Metamorphosis happens in dark underworlds, which is the whole point of Mycocosmic, really.

Thanks to Ann E. Michael for astute comments about Mycocosmic on her wonderful blog, and to everyone else whose near and distant companionship is keeping me going.