Mushrooms, Dandelions, And People

Today, I found a picture on my hard drive that I had stashed away some time ago that now reminds me of the video that I had posted yesterday.  

Meanwhile, back out in the yard, the bright red capped mushrooms in my yard have morphed, just as they were supposed to, into nearly flat caps, reddish-orange in the center, shading to bright yellow along the margin.  I'm now quite sure of my speciation of them as Caesar's mushrooms (Amanita caesarea), based not on the way they appear but on the changes that they go through, and therein lies a lesson.

It might be better to consider the mushrooms as a process than as an object.  Today they are red, orange and yellow flat caps, yesterday, they were bright red convex buds, and the day before that I'm told they were little white buttons (I didn't notice those).  As one point, they were probably just microscopic spores, and they're already falling apart, so tomorrow, they'll probably be fungal matter decaying on the ground and more spores back up in the air.

So, is Caesar's mushroom an object or a process?  Should it be considered a thing, a noun, or is it more like a verb?  "Sequence" might be the best term - a thing that is a process.

Picture a dandelion in your mind.  Go ahead, do it.  If you're like most people, you think of a little yellow flower.  Yet, for most of it's life, a dandelion is a green, broad-leafed weed, and at other times, it's a funny white puffball on a stalk.  Each of the spores on those puffballs looks like a little umbrella, and can float away on the breeze.  Each of those little umbrella-shaped spores is a whole and complete dandelion in itself.  So, like a mushroom, a dandelion isn't a fixed "thing," but a sequence, a process.  "Dandelion" is as much a verb as it is a noun. It's life "dandelioning," not a dandelion "living."  "Life dandelioning" sounds funny at first, but it actually makes more sense - all dandelions live, so saying "a dandelion is living" is not really saying much of anything.  But not all life is going through the dandelion process.

Now consider yourself.  I don't know about you, but my body wasn't always like this.  Once, I was a little boy, and before that, a tiny baby.  Before that, I suppose, I was a fetus floating in a womb of embryonic fluid, not even breathing, at least not with my own nose and lungs.  Before that, was I the spermatazoa or the ovum, or both, or neither?  Someday, if one of several thousand other possibilities don't catch up with me, I'll be an old man, and then, with certainty, someday a corpse.  And these changes in my physical aspect are trifling and insignificant compared to the changes in my mind, my interests and my memories, my personality and my so-called maturity (youth, it's been said, is a fleeting thing, but immaturity can last a lifetime).

It's probably best to consider all things, our selves included, not as "things" at all, but as process/sequences.  We shouldn't assign fixed labels to anything, and we should come to consider all things not by their appearance, but by their function.  

Considered this way, there are no hands and keyboards involved in composing these words that you're reading - there is only "typing."  I say this because the physical matter of these so-called "hands" change just like the rest of my body, and after "typing" has ended, the hands will eventually be engaged in other activities.  The "keyboard" will eventually, someday, be discarded and either be recycled into other "things" or else allowed to slowly and inelegantly decompose somewhere in a landfill (plastic and metal aren't very good at decomposing, but eventually, on a long enough time scale, they do). 

Mushrooms, dandelions, and people are all a process of transformation - a sequence, determined in part (but not completely by any means) by another sequence - DNA.  And it's not just life that transforms, as on a geologic time scale, mountains rise and erode away, sea levels rise and fall, glaciers expand and retreat and expand again.  Everything is in transition, and every "thing" is impermanent, and it took a mushroom to remind me. (And in case you're wondering after reading all of this, no, I didn't eat, smoke, or otherwise ingest the mushrooms - these are just the thoughts that arose while on the cushion after contemplating the mushrooms this morning.)