Great Good Folk of the Natural Medicine Community on Hive - I am excited to share with you some imagery and notes from a recent happy mushroom-hunting trip in the Matese mountains behind the Sannio valley in south Italy!
It was very successful in the conventional sense of finding a basket-full of beautiful specimens, and also it was a glorious realigning quest, where together my partner and I came to some profound shared experience of sentience and mental health in Nature....
My lifetime passion for all things mycology-related had to recalibrate when I moved to Italy; there are quite a few seasonal differences in mushroom cycles here, and quite a lot of variations in how the species express themselves this far south from my original home in Scotland.
Then there are wild woods to get familiar with - vast expanses of beech, oak, etc which lead into mountain landscape where you can get well lost.
As in Scotland, there are just a few deadly poisonous funghi here, and this is one which is similar enough to the infamous satanic-related Boletus, to keep both of us from even harvesting one to identify back at home. It is very healthy to have a good solid wariness around mushrooms which could have unpleasant outcomes - until one is absolutely sure of the species!
Nevertheless, it is getting easier to tune-in to the best edible mushrooms in this area, especially with the help of my partner who has been mushrooming for many years too. We came across multiple porcini or Boletus Edulis.
He calls it Porcino Estivo or Boletus Aestivalis, which means Summer Bolete, but either way - mushroom classifications change regularly, and I am sure that this is meant to confuse us about and/ or block us from accessing the magic of mushrooms - and to strongly mistrust them in general.
Some of the more modern books I have on mushrooms, overstress the poisonous aspects, and call many edible funghi 'inedible' and dangerous: above is a Lycoperdon Echinatum, which in my Italian book by Giunti Demetra on 'Tutto Funghi' is commestibile, but in my concise Collins Nature Guide by Edmund Garnweidner is labelled with a skull and crossbones!
We thought it might be edible, but were finding enough other funghi that it didn't seem necessary to take anything we weren't absolutely certain about.
I've never heard such openly-negative mythology and brainwashing around an area of wild food which is also so very beneficial to us as medicine. I intuite that many cases of stomach upsets or even mild poisonings, are likely to be a body being activated into a detoxification process or other natural cycles, by a mushroom ingested... This detoxification, in regards to the magic of funghi, might also be mental, emotional, energetic or cosmic, but we won't know if we instantly label a species or type 'toxic' just because one person (who might have e.g. a diseased liver) had a strong reaction to it.
Above is either Russula Claroflavo or the less edible Russula Ochraleuca; seems to be closer to the former, but the photo doesn't have enough info to convince me, for now!
Our relationship with funghi might be returned to a more dynamic and living one, if we were able to collectively face our fear around learning the actual, living, relative qualities of at least some of the myriad evolving varieties.
My partner saw a potentially good mushroom up a steep banking, and handed me the basket whilst he clambered up to check it: he was disappointed, and moved to climb back down - but I suggested that 'sometimes one plant calls you, to lead you to another more appropriate one for you' - and he went on up the hill a little, to find the glorious mazzo di funghi that he's holding above... including this King Bolete of a wonderful size and weight, which was the biggest that day!
He was really impressed with my having suggested such a thing, and this led to a most beautiful conversation around how we can seek with our whole spirit, rather than just with our front-lobe conscious.
With wild food and with mushrooms in particular, I know that this full-mindbodyspirit-aligned seeking and harvesting reaps the most beneficial rewards for all. I know that this kind of alignment has a part in activating special and even magical properties in our wild foods - making them available to us in a way that they would not be, if we were only looking with eyes and brain. Feasting on these beauties over the past days, my mind feels alert and my sentience alive - and my sense of the world providing for us feels more intact!
This is Santa Reggia, a kind of wild thyme or oregano, which grows abundantly on the exposed and dry mountainside above Pietraroja: we stopped on the way home to pick a nice bunch for drying and using in cooking, and had another lovely chat around the origins of the name, and how it signifies the importance of a herb - the words relate to saint and to royalty/ sovereignty.
This whole day was an enrichment for my soul, and a liberation for my mind into the sovereignty of Natural Law and a more-embodied sentience - all of which prepared me beautifully for yesterday and today, where I was writing an epic letter to the electrical company, to stop committing crimes against the people!
The walking in freedom, the clean air, the intuitive movement around the wildness of the place, the learning and sharing of wisdom, the closeness of partnership and beautiful bounty of our harvest... it was perfect. And such an antidote to navigating the machinations of the agenda, as it attempts to intrude more and more into privacy, health and our individual and collective benessere mentale...
MMMMMMmmmmmmmm. I also published this podcast around True Sovereignty vs 'royalty', relating to this subject of Natural Law and Lived Sovereignty, in case you'd like to hear more on the theme. I will upload this to Aureal podcast on Hive, as soon as technology permits!
