We've been taught to look away from decay. To see rot as failure, as ending, as something vaguely shameful that should happen out of sight. The fallen tree gets cleared. The dead leaves get bagged. The compost bin hides behind the garage.

But rot is not an ending. It's a transformation. The most essential one.

That log in the forest, soft and crumbling, covered in moss and mushrooms, is not dying. It's feeding everything around it. The wood that took decades to grow is being unmade, thread by thread, cell by cell, by fungi that know how to break the bonds lignin forms.

The nutrients locked in cellulose are being released and becoming available again. The tree is turning back into soil, into the elements that will feed the next generation of trees. This is not loss. This is the work that makes forests possible.

Mushrooms are a visible sign of this transformation. They fruit from the mycelium doing the invisible work beneath. Each mushroom means something is being broken down, digested, converted. Death becomes food, food becomes life. The cycle we forget when we sanitize decay out of view.

When you look closely, there's something striking about a log in late-stage decomposition. The way it holds its shape but crumbles at your touch. The colors. Rust orange. Deep umber. Silver grey where the bark has peeled. Green moss fills the gaps. Mushrooms in overlapping shelves.

The texture changes as fungi move through it. Hardwood becomes soft. Solid becomes spongy. Structure gives way slowly over weeks, months, and years. You can track the progress by feel, by the way your fingers sink in when you press.

This is beautiful if you let yourself see it that way. Not the beauty of new growth, but the beauty of transformation in process. The patience of decay. The thoroughness of it. Nothing wasted. Everything becoming something else.

Find a log. Not in your yard, where someone might haul it away, but somewhere it can stay. The woods. A park. A place where fallen wood is allowed to lie.

Visit it over months. Over years if you can, and watch what happens. The mushrooms that appear in sequence. Turkey tail first, perhaps, then other species as the wood softens. Beetles and insects doing their part. Moss establishing. The log slowly sinking into the forest floor.

Notice how long it takes. A small branch might disappear in a season. A substantial log can take a decade or more. The pace of decomposition depends on species, climate, and the fungi present. Oak resists longer than pine. Dry conditions slow everything. But given time, it all returns to the earth.

Once you take the time to observe what's around you, you'll start to see the forest differently. Not as static green, but as constant transformation. Everything falling, everything rising. The standing trees are temporary. The fallen trees are becoming soil. The mushrooms are bridges between states.

Decomposition is patient. Unless acted upon, it works at the pace chemistry allows, the pace mycelium can manage. Thread by thread, the complex becomes simple again.

Decomposition is thorough. Nothing is too tough to break down eventually. Lignin, the compound that makes wood woody, resists almost everything. But fungi evolved enzymes specifically to crack it. Given time, even the hardest wood becomes soft.

Decomposition is generous. Everything taken from soil returns to soil. The locked nutrients become available. What fed one organism will feed many others. Death sustains life. Not metaphorically. Literally.

We need reminders that endings are transformations. That what seems like loss is conversion. That decay is work. Essential work happening constantly, whether we watch or not.

The mushrooms growing from that fallen tree are proof. Not of death, but of what comes after. The slow, patient, beautiful process of becoming something else.

A spore lands. Smaller than the dust motes floating past your window, but carrying everything needed to begin. It sits dormant until conditions align. Moisture. Temperature. The right substrate underneath.

Then germination. A single hypha extends outward, thread-thin and searching. Alone, it cannot do much. But when it encounters another compatible hypha, they fuse. Two become one networked organism, and now the mycelium can truly spread.

What happens next is mostly invisible. Thousands of hyphal threads branch and extend through wood or soil or whatever substrate they've claimed. The mycelium eats by secreting enzymes that break down complex organic matter into absorbable nutrients. This is the real work of the fungus. This is where it spends most of its existence. Days or months or even decades, depending on the species. Just growing. Just spreading. Just feeding.

Then something shifts. A temperature drop. Rain after drought. Some environmental trigger the mycelium recognizes. It decides to fruit. Tiny knots of hyphal tissue form, organizing themselves into structure. Primordia become pins, become recognizable mushroom shapes, pushing upward.

What took months underground happens in days above. The mushroom emerges. Stem elongates. Cap expands. Gills or pores or teeth develop on the underside. The whole apparatus exists for one purpose: releasing spores.

And it does. Millions of them. Billions, depending on the species. Cast into the air or carried by water or insects. The mushroom itself begins to decompose within days or weeks of opening. Its work finished. But the mycelium remains below, intact and alive, ready to fruit again when conditions return.

Spore to spore. The cycle completing itself. It has continued this way for 400 million years. It will continue long after we've gone.

Your fresh mushrooms need to breathe. Store them in paper bags instead of plastic, and they'll last days longer in the refrigerator. Mushrooms respirate even after harvest, releasing moisture that gets trapped in plastic and turns everything slimy overnight. Paper absorbs the excess while letting air circulate. The mushrooms stay firm, stay fresh, stay ready for when you're ready to cook them.

Until next week,

--Jeremy
Wandering Spore

I hope you’ve learned something today. What questions do you have about mushrooms? Hit reply and let me know what you'd like to know more about.