Wonder, Love, and Mushrooms

by Jon Balsbaugh

“Are you the professor who … likes mushrooms?” a student hesitantly asked at the beginning of the semester. I suppose we are known by our loves.

I have long been an amateur forager. Growing up in Oregon, my high school offered a course in Edible Plants. (Yes, the Pacific Northwest is … different.) We learned how to identify dock and sorrel, blanch dandelion leaves to remove their bitterness, prepare a comfrey poultice, and even make perfume from wild roses. The message was clear regarding mushrooms, though. Don’t. You may die. So for decades I avoided the siren song of the Kingdom of the Fungi.

Then several years ago I was walking in the Warren Woods Forest Primeval (a real place in Western Michigan) and saw some local mushroom hunters, baskets under their arms, wandering through the silver beeches. I knew it was time. Setting aside the possibility of death, I was going to learn how to forage for mushrooms. I set to it almost immediately, armed with books on mushrooming, Google searches, Facebook groups, and several mushroom ID apps.

Make no mistake, there are wild mushrooms that can kill you — not as many as some believe, but they are out there. They are not even very far away. I found my first “destroying angel” (Amanita bisporigera) while walking the outer reaches of my college’s arboretum in between classes last October. Other deadly mushrooms come with similarly ominous names like death cap and funeral bell. The worst of these have amatoxins that do their damage not in the stomach but at the cellular level. Symptoms are mild at first then disappear entirely; but at the very time the victim wouldn’t think to go to the doctor, the amatoxin is at work, disrupting the transcription factors of RNA polymerase II. Up to thirty percent of amatoxin poisonings are fatal. Others lead to emergency liver transplants or long recovery. Mushrooming is not to be taken lightly. 

However, I learned (with relief) that even most mushrooms considered “toxic” will only give you bad indigestion. I also learned (with delight) that many well-known mushrooms are easy to identify, have no poisonous look-alikes, and are relatively safe to forage. These have gentler names: chicken of the woods, lion’s mane, chanterelles, puffballs, oyster mushrooms, and so on. With minimal study and maximal care it is almost impossible to misidentify these. Even as a cautious and occasional forager, I have still found over sixty pounds of maitake mushrooms (hen of the woods) in the past two years. These massive fruiting bodies grow as large as fifty pounds (though the largest I have found weighed in at a little under eight). It is also a choice mushroom that sells for nearly twenty dollars a pound and is very difficult to misidentify.

Somewhere between “sure to kill you” and “always safe” are a host of species that require more careful identification, spore prints, and even microscopes. I have foraged for some of these but avoid even possible misidentification. 98% sure is 2% darn unsure when death is on the line.

Over the past two years, I have foraged in forests, parks, and graveyards. I have found pheasant’s back, wood blewits, morels, wood ears, witch’s butter, and elf cups. I have sauteed them, souped them, and dried them. I have served dinner guests blackened shrimp of the woods, maitake steaks, and vegan scallops. And all along the way, I have been learning continuously.

There was biology to understand. What we call a “mushroom” is only the fruiting body of a much larger organism made up primarily of mycelia. Though not a neural net, per se, these mycelia do have similar characteristics. They receive information and communicate through biochemical and bioelectric signals — not only with themselves but also with the trees and plants around them. A single honey mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae) in the Blue Mountains of Oregon has been growing for almost three thousand years, covers nearly four square miles, and may weigh thousands of tons. It is believed to be the world’s largest living organism. Many mushrooms are associated with particular types of trees. So if you want to identify mushrooms it helps to be able to identify trees by their leaves or even by their bark alone. 

Even more enriching, though, are the aesthetic dimensions of mushrooming. Of course, there is a culinary angle. Cooking is an art. Wild mushrooms also have beautiful colors and subtle textures, especially in the forest light. So I often take my camera with me when I forage. Finally, there is something poetic about mushrooming. After one trip into the woods inspired a mushroom-related poem, I discovered that other poets had shared the same impulse to compose poems about mushrooms: Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson (“The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants”), and others. To me, mushrooms have something of a “Holy Saturday” feel to them — trapped between death and resurrection.

All of this may seem a bit obsessive. After all … mushrooms? But the obsession has to do with the unleashing of what the ancients called “wonder” (thaumazein). According to Aristotle, “It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize.”  Plato, too, had written that “wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.” 

We tend to associate wonder with an “aha” moment — something coming at the end of a long pursuit or in a flash of inspiration. But for the ancients, “wonder” was not the satisfaction of intellectual desire but the desire itself. It is the peculiar quality that sparks an intellectual pursuit for its own sake.

Nor was wonder for them always about the big questions of life. In fact, as Aristotle notes in the same text, philosophy usually begins with “wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities.” Only “by gradual progression” do we begin to ask questions about the greater matters. There is a movement from wondering about some peculiarity of mushrooms to writing poetry about them to contemplating the meaning of life itself — but it starts with the humble mushroom. 

That is a surprising progression — from mushrooms to meaning, but it is possible because all things are united by their ultimate cause. The thoughts we draw from reality are like the fruiting bodies of a vast interconnected “network of being.” Beyond this, the Christian encounters reality not merely as “being” but also as a created order — an order that is, as Gerard Manely Hopkins puts it, “charged with the grandeur of God.” The inky cap mushrooms along my favorite walking path owe their existence to a creator. This gives my interactions with them a truly personal dimension. God is the giver. They are gifts. And I am the recipient.

Wonder, love, and mushrooms — a strange mantra, I’ll admit. Still, perhaps at an institution of higher learning it is all the more important to have something like this to hold on to. It’s easy in an academic environment to forget that wonder and philosophy aren’t things bound in a book and filed in the library.

So even if it’s not mushrooms, I would commend to you wonder, love, and something — birds, trees, fish, woodworking, tea, plein-air painting. Anything will do, really, as long as it brings you close enough to the created order to remind you even amid challenges that “for all this, nature is never spent.” 

“Wonder, Love, and Mushrooms” is republished here with the gracious permission of The Hillsdale Forum, a student-run publication of Hillsdale College (Hillsdale, MI). The essay has been lightly adapted to fit a general audience.

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Are you an amateur forager yourself? Join the conversation by sharing your favorite finds and what they meant to you in the comments below.

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Jon Balsbaugh is the founder and editor-in-chief of Veritas Journal and owner and operator of Kairos Educational Consulting. Though his soul still imagines itself in the Pacific Northwest of his childhood, he now lives in South Bend, IN. He and his wife have five children. Mr. Balsbaugh has been involved in classical education for nearly thirty years as a teacher, administrator, speaker and consultant. In addition to reading, writing, and thoughtful contemplation of ideas, he enjoys seeing the world through the lens of his three primary hobbies: fly fishing, foraging, and photography.

Header Image: “Wood Blewits (Lepista/Clitocybe nuda)” (2022), © Kairos Photography