A Forager's Pace

I was invited to write a piece for Shamanic Reiki Worldwide this month. Shamanic Reiki Worldwide offers a three-year journey of apprenticeship training that empowers personal healing, strengthens your connection with nature, and supports your work with others and with nature.

Message me if you have any questions about the program.

Dear Friend,

Here in the rainforest on the Northwest Coast of Oregon (USA), we are experiencing cooler nights, sweeping clouds, and inches and inches of rain to generously fill streams and swell rivers to host the return of the sacred salmon.

The bright and bountiful days of summer are now memories held in the reserve of garlic, onions, and squash curing in the cold garage. As much as I love my garden, it is a relief to reach this time of year when I can winterize the beds with a thick layer of mulched leaves and tuck garlic seeds and cover crops like fava and peas, into the rich soil.

This is the time when I switch my energy from tending vegetables, herbs, and fruits to foraging wild mushrooms. I go from a 20 x 20-foot elk proofed fenced garden to a great scavenger hunt in the wild. In the woods, a multi-colored carpet extends in all directions and requires that I slow my pace and sharpen my eye if I’m to have any success in finding a few delicious fruits in the understory before deer and voles, among others, have nibbled them away.

Amanita muscaria, a vivid red and white scaled beauty, is easily identifiable and what I consider to be a glistening symbol of a healthy mycorrhizal zone. Her existence on the trail is equivalent to the message - you’ve come to the right place! But I leave her alone, not only because she is regarded as mostly inedible and toxic, but because it’s like removing a guidepost for others.

Two edible favorites in the Pacific Northwest are the tasty Golden chanterelle, who pushes through soil and moss near mature Douglas firs and reveals themselves as yellow or orange wavy edged funnels, and the modest but delicious Matsutake (or pine mushroom) who shows up as a small white bump in the duff, expertly hidden, and requiring a careful removal from well below the surface.

The truth is, as a novice mushroomer I’m mostly unsuccessful and that isn’t all bad. The forager’s pace, slow and attentive, allows for other things to come into awareness: the luxurious Club moss draped over Bigleaf maple limbs; shiny Pacific banana slugs; the Obscure darkling beetles chomping their way through decaying organic matter; the flight of a handsome Common merganser duck moving up river in search of small fish; or miraculously and remarkably, Chinook salmon spawning in the shallows of the rushing river. My basket might be empty of mushrooms, but my heart is full.

We don’t have to be searching for mushrooms to intimately explore nature. I welcome you to try the forager’s pace, you might discover a whole world that was heretofore hidden.