Join the adventurous worm “Bud” as he roams through the Australian bush, narrating a light-hearted yet poignant poem about the elusive search for magic mushrooms.
Ever feel like the more you search for something the harder it becomes to find? It’s almost as if the very act of wanting creates the distance.
What if the problem isn’t where we’re looking for, but how we’re looking? The expectation or the attachment to the result.
Modern consumerism thrives upon this way of thinking. Everything is about results… efficiency, convenience, getting what we want with as little effort as possible. Google serves up answers before we’ve even finished asking the question. GPS tells us exactly where to go. Algorithms predict what we’ll like before we’ve even considered it ourselves. This worldview creates expectations.
Foraging doesn’t work that way. Within natures innate wisdom, the bush doesn’t care about urgency. It won’t adjust itself to fit our human needs or rules. And yet, as in the “Foragers Lament”, when the mushrooms don’t appear on demand, it becomes easy to fall back on humanities ‘better’ or ‘easier’ solution. In the poem, the frustration isn’t really about the mushrooms… it satirically conveys the emotional connection to the discomfort of not getting what we want.
And that discomfort is part of what drives the “human driven solution” which tries to alleviate the frustration of missing out, but it comes at a cost in that we can miss the chance to notice the small yet meaningful moments like the quiet of the forest, the crunch of leaves underfoot, the way the air smells after rain. The beauty and wisdom of our natural world. These are all part of the journey, not the destination.
Maybe the real trick is letting go of constructed belief systems? Accepting that some things remain unseen, and that not every search leads to a find and that’s OK.
