2023 Mycelium #9 Trees and a Forest

The magpie warbling outside my window waking me up this morning is such a comfort. The familiarity of the song holds me in place and time. Magpies remind me of my Dad, father energy. There are doves in the tree across the road holding a conversation and developing tactics to deal with the miner birds. I live on a suburban street about half a kilometre from a beach, but the seabirds don’t come by at all. Everyone seems to know their place and their territory. Very good instruction for the human world! All the lessons for us are in nature.

We had quite a discussion this week in Council about the tree canopy and it got me thinking about life underground too. (How all the trees connect up is well documented and perhaps Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees is a good place to start, if you are new to this kind of thinking. As he writes “a tree can only be as strong as  the forest that surrounds it.”  This is an interconnectivity that brings strength, not just life.  We too need each other and help each other be strong and lively. Communities are a human version of a forest.

One of the communities that has sustained me over the past five years is Coralus (formerly SheEO) and this morning I am reflecting on how this community has built a canopy for me, nourished me by growing strong trees I too could draw nutrients from and rely on to keep growing, when I needed a rest or to hibernate for a while. Some of the life of the community is hidden, the impact can’t be  measured, but I can see the forest, I can see tall trees, I can see green shoots and I can see a canopy where there wasn’t one before. There is a forest, an ecosystem of female founders and funders who have found new ways together, having mindsets with an arc of potential and enough, globally connected and pivoting on shared values, hope and love. There is a spirit of what it means to be landed in the story of past generations, the wonder of what kind of ancestors we might want to be, deep respect of ancient wisdom of Aboriginal peoples from all lands and the power of the collective and business to transform, unlock, unleash, amplify and accelerate each other’s potential for the common good.

I have missed this community over the past six months as I have been busy with my own canopy building in my place, and it is good to be back in their company this week end. Women and non-binary folks have come from all over the country and some from other parts of the world. It feels like a harvest, it feels like a hug, it feels like I might have forgotten canopies get built by planting trees, letting the nutrients find their way to each other, communication under the earth bubbles up through the branches and the leaves …. where eventually the magpie finds its home to wake me in the morning.

I am going to hang on to the thought of the canopy above and the conversations below and give thanks for all the nourishment I receive from the human version of trees, and trees, that keep nourishing me. I honestly can’t by without any of them.  Please be trees so we can be canopy and forests for one another.

 “The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today.” Peter Wohlleben

You can find this tree here