Magic Mushrooms

A short post today...For the second time in as many weeks, I was puttering around the house in my sweats - the equivalent of my jammies, not prepared for company, when there was a call at the door. I didn't have time to run upstairs and put on real clothes, and because I was feeling poorly the night before, and slept in, I must have looked a sight!  Anyway, it was my friend David, with someone whose name I had heard before, from the town of 500 people a bit east of here. He had a grocery bag (or is it a sack?) full of purplish mushrooms, picked up the hill behind the barn. Edible. Cool. We talked mushrooms for about a half hour. Walked over to the compost pile. Nothing there. But we walked up to where he had picked these babies for dinner, and found another type he couldn't identify and chose not to try to eat. He exhorted me to read and test and educate myself, but I am reluctant to be my own guinea pig. Still I will be making spore prints with these two types later today.

I am struck at the way "learning" comes in the door here, or appears along the side of the road.  The Harvard educator John Stilgo has written "Outside Lies Magic" and he exhorts his students to walk and look, and see and listen. He asks them to examine manhole covers and the way the grass is patterned after a mowing, and the color of smoke from a chimney against clouds or blue sky--clues to what is being burned for heat.  Too often I spend entire days in my desk chair and the only learning I do is on a single screen.  

There are millions of others, who spend their time at the desk or in transit between desk and television and desk again, who get their information from the screen. They don't feel the cold, because they have central heating. They don't sweat in summer because their homes, and cars and workplaces are air-conditioned.  How are they to understand climate change and its impacts until a Hurricane wipes out their farm stand at Union Square's green market? And then, they work around the loss of red peppers with something imported from Uruguay. 

We have been talking for years now, about the need to design the workplace and the community to encourage people to walk, because we are an increasingly obese population. I am struck that we need to design to encourage people to walk, so that they can begin to see the magic. And hear it. And taste it. And feel it.

I am thinking I need to get dressed earlier in the day, and walk, or put on a pot of tea for visitors. If you are in the neighborhood, please stop in.