90 ~ Morels report, and Memorial Day

This year Corina and I did fairly well on morels.  With a fair bit of searching (at times mosquitoey and sweaty in this warm May!), we found about six pounds – not a bumper harvest, but much better than any of the last three years.

Morels are a special food – as well as one of the first wild foods to appear in the still young year, each time I find one, like each time I feel a wild trout on my line, there is a sense of being blessed, of being given access to a miracle. I have never taken for granted a trout or a morel (or a perfect egg from my hens’ nest box), and I hope I never will.

Another power that morels hold is as exceptional teachers of the paradoxical yet utter necessity of death to feed life.  As I walk through the woods on a morel search, I don’t scan the ground for life, but I look up for death – for the crowns of dead trees.  Without the deaths of elms and other trees, there would be no morels.  Morels are an old or ailing elm tree’s last farewell to the world, its funeral feast.

And so each time Corina and I find and cut some of these miracle foods, we make offerings of gratitude, not only to the morels for their gifts of life, but to the dead tree under which they grew, whose passing made the morels’ emergence possible.

Death to abundant life.

Unfortunately, some deaths don’t feed life, but can drain life and peace from those who remain.  On this Memorial Day, I invite us to remember not only Americans who have lost their lives in service, but also the many more innocent lives that America’s recent misguided wars have killed; for example, one million Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodians in the Vietnam War, and some hundreds of thousands in Iraq.

  The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, DC is inscribed with the names of 58,320 Americans killed or missing in the conflict. Yet this represents less than 6% of the lives lost, and the tears shed for those losses, during that long war. Perhaps our nation can know true healing - and maturity - when we start to remember and honor those other names, as well.