The Mushroom
I was walking down the porch this morning and realized I had a visitor in my little Zen rock garden. A rather large, plump looking mushroom. A stranger. One I’d never seen before. A quick search suggested it might be Penny Bun (Boletus edulis). Apparently, it’s a prized mushroom and edible. But don’t think for a second I’ll eat a mushroom based on what Google tells me. Nope. I’m just going to look at it, and marvel, because it is pretty.
But isn’t that how all traps are set? Attraction. Look at me, said the spider to the fly. And before you know it, you’re dead and you’re someone else’s meal. Or the pretty girl winks at you and you’re a meal ticket of another sort. Or the screen flickers and the new car rolls out and before you know it, you’re in debt up to your eyeballs because you just had to have a car with all the bells and whistles that responded to your every touch, and went off road, too, because we all need to drive in a ditch.
Sorry, that’s a long way to go because I saw a mushroom. But that’s what shrooms can do for you, open the doors of perception, although that was another plant and now we’re all confused. Suffice it to say I grew up in the sixties when people took a lot of things for a lot of reasons. Mostly, they were fixed on the idea of what something could do “for” them, while I always got stuck on the idea of what it might do “to” me. Different approaches. But it brings me back to my mushroom and why I’m only going to look at it.