UNDERGROUND BECOMING: On mushrooms, hidden movements, and the extravagant Yes of collective liberation

Referendum from the mycelial underground—
The forest has voted YES.
Motion carried overwhelmingly by spore majority.

This beautiful bolete emerged practically overnight.

It’s one of the bruising boletes, whose golden pores turn dark almost immediately upon touch, through the sudden oxidation of compounds within its tissues.

Robin Wall Kimmerer introduces the Anishinaabe word puhpowee in her gorgeous book Braiding Sweetgrass: the force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.

Imagine having a word for that!

A word that recognizes the mysterious, unseen forces bringing life into being.

What if we became more attuned to the subtle but powerful energies pushing and pulling life into new forms every moment?

What if we cultivated richer, more animate vocabularies, beyond the language of Empire, that both reflect and shape the futures we desire? Language that refuses erasure and the logic of domination. Language that woos and lures new possibilities into being. (see previous post on the celebration of wild wordlings and the radical imagination)

And yet what appears to emerge overnight is often the fruiting of long, unseen growth. Beneath the forest floor, fungal networks have been branching, exchanging, gathering, and responding to the living world long before any mushroom appears for me to get excited about. Mycelial weaves, hyphal trajectories seeking and providing nourishment, and unseen histories making the present possible.

I think of all the hidden work, pain, play, and presence beneath the surface of my own life, and all our own lives. The underground tending and becoming that precedes what the world finally recognizes.

And I think of the countless movements for collective liberation, the communities organizing, resisting, repairing, and reimagining how we live together.

How much of what sustains them happens out of sight? The relationships being nurtured, the trust being cultivated, the ruptures and repair, the seeds planted, the stories shared, the small acts of mutual aid and care. The imaginative work of dismantling the spell of inevitability and remembering that other worlds are possible.

Our feeds and news headlines are often only about the machinery of domination, the ecosystem harms, the violence and corruption of Empire, the latest horrors. And those horrors are real. But they are not the whole of what is happening.

There are so many stories growing beneath the surface.

---

The Underground Dream

Last year I had a dream of a vast underground resistance movement.

It was partly literally underground, in enormous spaces reclaimed from abandoned infrastructure. I was stunned by its size. I was bringing food down, including several loaves of bread and foods from different countries, among them knafeh, a traditional Arab dessert.

I also had a long black bag in tow, full of lost toys and tools. Musical instruments, memorabilia, smaller bags of things we had somehow forgotten or left behind.

Others were arriving with their own long black bags (Shadow work??!!), helping one another haul them down the escalators, unpacking, recovering what had been lost.

People who had never worked and played together were working and playing together.

A beloved folk song for Gaza was playing, bringing people to tears. Groups gathered for briefings, sharing successes and strategies.

The commitment to collective liberation was palpable.

But it wasn’t only a resistance movement. It was a creation movement.

We were living the new world into being.

I woke energized, filled with a radiant trust in us.

---

Sometimes our dreaming psyches are weaving long before anything fruits in our waking lives. And that’s what this mushroom, and Kimmerer’s introduction to puhpowee, brings back to me.

Not simply the surprising moment when something breaks through the surface, but all that has been growing, gathering, collaborating, and becoming before we could see it.

New worlds don’t arrive all at once. Nor do they arrive on their own.

They grow through relationships, refusals, collective imagination. They emerge from our grief, our play, our inconvenient and extravagant Yeses.

Of course, as any gardener, dreamer, artist, or activist knows, not every spore becomes a mushroom. Not every dream comes to fruition. Not every beautiful experiment succeeds. There will be failures, false starts, and whole compost heaps of abandoned plans.

The art is not in guaranteeing an outcome, but in remaining faithful to the liberatory possibilities we are helping bring into being. The mycelial underground isn’t taking a vote on guaranteed outcomes. It’s voting for Life.

(More on this later this week in “Starlight at the Site of Failure,” where we’ll explore how prophetic artistry might germinate from our magnificent flops.)

We are not only resisting the world that is dying. We are already practicing the worlds that are beginning.

Those invisible networks of possibility are already alive beneath our feet—we are part of their becoming.

So Yes to the underground dream.

Yes to the extravagant work of emergence.

Yes to the impossible worlds already alive among us.

The real conspiracy is towards Life

We fall to our knees—

We, crooked creatures
err on the side of soil and fire

open to the opening Earth
burn our Yeses
and accept the consequences
(From “Burn Our Yeses” in Becoming Beautiful Barbarians)