Sang He carefully picked up the last coal and put it in the tinder at the bottom of the brush pile. … a tongue of flame licked under the tinder. It ate all the tinder and reached greedily for the brush. Soon the whole pile was aflame.
                                                 from Fire Keeper’s Son
                                              written by Linda Sue Park
                                              illustrated by Julie Downing
                                                     Clarion Books, 2004

    Linda Sue Park’s story is based on the Fire Keepers of ancient Korea. Sang He's father taught him how to build a fire safely. Each night, Fire Keepers lit fires in turn on the hillsides of Korea. Each hilltop was closer to the king’s palace than the one before. When the fire on the closest hilltop was visible to the king, he knew that all was well in the kingdom. 
    Smokey the Bear loomed over my childhood fire safety education. My family didn’t camp often, but when we did, we were mindful of the condition of our campsite. We were careful to leave it better than we found it. That’s what I learned in Girl Scouts. Mom was my troop leader. She showed us how to wrap bits of a candle in wax paper like pieces of salt-water taffy, and safely use them to start a campfire. We mostly used our fires to cook s’mores.
    In our family room we had what Mom called a Franklin Stove. It was free-standing, a pot-bellied affair made of cast iron. Mom would make taffy-looking starters like in the old Girl Scout days.
    Dad liked to bowl. Being the genial fellow that he was, mostly, he was able to acquire old bowling pins the alley didn’t need any more. They were paint-chipped, broken-necked, or sported some other type of damage. But, they made good log substitutes, and we had an unending supply. The fire was warm and comforting. 
    Now, we have a fire pit in our backyard. When the grandkids come over, we cook hotdogs and of course s’mores. Nothing smells like a wood fire. And the flames are a constant source of motion, influenced by the wind, but not dominated by it.
    I have memories of good fire. My memory fires were all contained. They were all useful. They provided warmth and cooked food, mostly dessert. They helped me tap into something natural and primal.
    I know people who have experienced bad fire, house fires that burned memories. The destruction was costly, in a literal way, but emotionally, too. 
    It feels like our whole country is going up in smoke. As of yesterday (9/14/2020), fires in the West have burnt an area equivalent to the size of the state of Connecticut. Here’s a map showing just the fires burning in California. https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/. Some of the active fires at the bottom of the page are slightly contained. As of last night (Monday), the Bullfrog and the Fork Fires are 7% contained. So far, eighty-seven large fires have burned more than 4.6 million acres in 10 states. https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/nfn.htm (National Interagency Fire Center) Most are only partly contained.
    Hundreds of thousands of people are under evacuation orders in California, Oregon, Washington State, and Idaho while our country experiences the worst health crisis since 1918.  
    Prime farm land is burning. Besides lettuce, tree nuts, broccoli, celery, plums, spinach, and carrots, crops are grown in greenhouses. Lots of beef and dairy come from California, too.             
    Fueled by an extreme heat wave that followed a severe drought, climate change is exacerbating weather-related damage. While the western part of the United States has never experienced this many wildfires in any one year, the smoke is also especially harmful. Here’s a map from NOAA showing the smoke as an overlay of the geographical map: https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/land/hms.html. Scroll down and click on maps. 
    According to Jennifer Balch, fire scientist and Earth Lab director at the University of Colorado, Bolder, the 20,000+ firefighters currently working cannot stop the amount of active fires burning right now. Fires need a warm climate, fuel, and ignition. We are changing all three conditions, and have built hundreds and thousands of homes in harm’s way.
    From the redwood forests to the gulf stream waters, our country is in physical danger. Fires and hurricanes are whipping our land and water into a frenzy of destruction. 
    This is no time to feel hopeless, though. Lots of work still needs to be done by those of us who can. Stay aware of current politics, do what you can to spread truth and Truth, and cast your vote as early as you can.
                                            -—stay curious! (and hopeful)    

And suddenly [the ant, the butterfly, and the mouse, and the sparrow and the rabbit] knew why there was enough room under the mushroom for all of them.
    Do you know what happens to a mushroom when it rains? 
    It grows!
                                         from: Mushroom in the Rain
                                           written by Vladimir Suteev
                   translated from the Russian by Mirra Ginsburg
                    illustrated by Jose Aruego and Arianne Dewey
                              Aladdin Books/Simon & Schuster, 1974
                                     accessed on YouTube 9/7/2020

    The last time it rained at my house, I found beautiful, golden mushrooms ringing a wreath around my forsythia. Several things came together when I saw that. I had a memory-flash of pouring over a mushroom guide with my grandson and cautioning him to NEVER, EVER taste one he might find outside! I thought of a friend who was the mushroom expert at our county Poison Control Center. And I just finished a book by Merlin Sheldrake called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape our Futures (Random House, 2020).
    Fungi make up their own life-form, separate from the animal, vegetable, bacteria, and protist (all the single-celled life forms not bacteria) categories. It’s true that there is some overlap, confusion, even controversy. While the Five Kingdoms are the accepted standard, some scientists have divided protists further. Some have even suggested Seven Kingdoms. I’ll leave that to them and refocus on fungi.
    Some surprising facts from https://www.sciencekids.co.nz/sciencefacts/food/mushrooms.html 

• Mushrooms get the energy they need to survive without using photosynthesis.
• Modern studies show mushrooms have many medical benefits. (ALWAYS check with your doctor first!)
• One portobello can contain more potassium than a banana. (Good thing. I hate bananas!)
• Mushrooms are about 90% water.
• China produces about half of all cultivated mushrooms.  
• Over 30 species of mushroom produce the chemical reaction, bioluminescence. They glow in the dark. 
• Before synthetic dyes were invented, mushrooms were used for dying many natural fibers. They produce strong, vivid colors.
  
• and from https://earthsky.org/earth/largest-land-organism-honey-fungus: The largest fungus in North America lives in Oregon. It is a honey fungus that measures 3.4 miles across. 

    All mushrooms are fungi, but not all fungi are mushrooms. Mushrooms act like the flower of a plant. They produce the microscopic spores vital to reproduction. The rest of the organism lives in soil or wood and is made of thread-like strands called mycelium. Mycelia draw water and nutrients from the soil to feed the fungus and make chemicals they share with other organisms in the soil. But wait! There’s more! Trees and other plants share information, too. Trees can sabotage unwelcome plants by spreading toxic chemicals through the same mycelial network.
    Most fungi are either sapotrophic (which thrive on dead, organic substances like fallen tree trunks) or mycorrhizal (in symbiosis with living, woody plants). 
    A symbiotic relationship, one where each organism benefits the other, is a win-win. It has been clearly shown since at least 2009, that trees and fungi both fair better when they are in symbiosis with each other. And almost 90% are.
    A May 15, 2019, article in phys.org, https://phys.org/news/2019-05-symbiotic-relationships-trees-microbes-worldwide.html describes a group of Stanford researchers who worked with 200 scientists and discovered Read’s Rule, named after a pioneer in symbiosis research, Sir David Read. Simply put, the rule states “symbiotic relationships obey clear rules and are strongly related to climate, and that climate change is likely to have massive impacts on the symbiotic state of the world’s forests.”
    The researchers and scientists mapped the locations of millions of trees and their symbiotic fungal relationships to determine how climate, soil chemistry, local vegetation, and the particular topography of an area affect how well each symbiotic relationship works. 
    Two types of symbioses help trees, each in its own way:
        arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi help promote growth by improving the ability of trees to take up water and nutrients from the soil and help them grow stronger. 
        ectomycorrhizal fungi are are believed to improve plant health by encouraging a plant’s resistance to stresses such as drought, salinity, heavy metals, and pathogens like the harmful types of fungi.
    What’s in it for the fungi? Since they don’t make their own energy through photosynthesis, fungi depend on their host plants to provide energy producing sugars the fungi need to sustain their own growth.
    Fungi even help control the amount of carbon in our atmosphere.                          Ectomycorrhizal fungi are mostly found in temperate and cold climates. They work in a slow carbon cycle and help pull carbon from the atmosphere. Wood and other organic matter decay slowly. But, as temperatures rise, our temperate and cool-climate trees along with their fungal networks are finding it harder and harder to survive. They are being lost and replaced by their tropical, fast-carbon-cycle cousins. 
    Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are more dominant in the tropics. They are faster growing and promote fast carbon cycling. They help promote growth by improving a tree’s ability to take up water and nutrients from the soil, but due to higher overall temperatures, droughts, and deforestation tropical rain forests are consuming a third less carbon than they did in the 1990s. 
    These trends are likely to continue. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/04/tropical-forests-losing-their-ability-to-absorb-carbon-study-finds
    As the Wood Wide Web (no kidding, it’s a real thing https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/wood-wide-web-underground-network-microbes-connects-trees-mapped-first-time) continues to be a focus of study for mycologists, dendrologists, and regular biologists, we’re all learning how strong connections to our planet and each other are necessary for our collective survival. 
                                   -—stay curious! (and eat mushrooms —        
                      from a trusted market or grocery store only!)  

Even if you have just one tree, it is nice, too. A tree is nice because it has leaves. 
The leaves whisper in the breeze all summer long.
                                                 From: A Tree is Nice
                                         written by Janice May Udry
                                            pictures by Marc Simont
                                                          Harper, 1956
                                       Winner: Caldecott Medal, 1957
                                  accessed on YouTube 8/30/2020

    Girl Scout Day Camp was a feature of many of my growing-up summers. We spent time in the woods learning to Be Prepared, leave Nature better than we found it, and find our way with a compass. I never got the hang of using a compass, but that was okay. Even when I was very young, 8 or 9 maybe, I loved to be in the woods. If I got lost, I’m not sure how long it would take for me to care. Probably till I got hungry or had to go to the bathroom.
    Although we were outside in the park, we were not really forest bathing. 
    I only heard of Forest Bathing recently. When I began my research, I was surprised to find so much interest in something I thought was new.
    The first thing I discovered is Forest Bathing is not so new. The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries created the term shinrin-yoku in 1982. It translates to “forest bathing” or “absorbing the forest atmosphere.” 
     While physically being present in a forest, or an urban park, or your backyard even, the object is not a literal immersion, but more of a spiritual one. Being fully present to all your senses and staying in the moment, for about 40 minutes will reap benefits.
    And you don’t need hiking gear, jogging shorts, or riding helmets. A leisurely walk on a trail or path, an easy pace, an eye and ear open to sights and sounds seems simple. But, intension is key. Awareness of the moment is vital. Carefully touching tree bark, gently stroking a flower petal, smelling a pine tree or a skunk can be part of the experience. No tasting, though. Unless you’re sure, really positively sure. I still say, no tasting. No berries, no mushrooms, no greenery. The sensation of taste is closely connected to smell. Being aware of that is enough.
    Want to lower your blood pressure, heart rate, and level of the stress hormone, cortisol? Take a walk in the woods. A study cited in a Time Magazine article from May 1, 2018, shows “being in nature can restore our mood, give us back our energy and vitality, and refresh and rejuvenate us.” https://time.com/5259602/japanese-forest-bathing/ 
    You might want a guide. The Association of Nature and Forest Therapy provides a training program in the science of Forest Bathing. A guide encourages the natural connection we humans have with our environment. Several practice in the Cleveland, Ohio, area. https://www.natureandforesttherapy.org/membership/guide-directory#!directory/map 
    Evergreens secrete a chemical, phytoncide, that is associated with improvements in the immune system. Creativity can improve by 50 percent, as shown in a study by David Strayer. The psychological effects of urban walking vs. nature walking show nature walks tend to correlate with improvements in mood.
    To sum it up, “[f]orest therapy is about creating relationships between humans and the more-than-human world, in which the relationship itself becomes a field of healing and a source of joyful well-being.” https://www.natureandforesttherapy.org/about/the-practice-of-forest-therapy  
    Stefano Mancuso, a founder of the Society for Plant Neurobiology, claims that even without neurons and a brain, plants can acquire, process, and integrate information to shape their behavior in a way that could be called intelligent. In his very popular and extremely interesting book, The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohllben discusses the way trees communicate among themselves. Merlin Sheldrake shows us how fungi and our relationships with them are changing our understanding of how life works in his fascinating Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures.
    Maybe they can’t hear with ears, but I thank my cucumber plant each time I take its gifts. I do the same with my tomato plants. The basil, parsley, and chives, too. I heard awhile back that the reason to talk to your plants is to give them an extra dose of carbon dioxide from your out-breath. I’m sure that doesn’t hurt, but I do believe they understand me, on some other level.  
    Without getting overly sentimental, I respect my plants for doing what they do even bound in pots that probably cramp their rooty toes. When I sit quietly behind the forsythia and listen to the bees work in the tiny thyme flowers and notice contrasting scents and colors of marigold and tomato plants, I’m awed. 
    Science proves that feeling awe redirects our concern away from ourselves and toward the greater good.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2014-6-november-december/feature/science-awe. The feeling of awe is most often elicited by nature. That’s part of why it's restorative. Feeling awe is energizing and humbling. A feeling of grandeur mixed with insignificance. Wonder and understanding on a very deep level.
    Sometimes you know something is true just because it’s True. The Truths of forest bathing, the sentiency of non-human life forms (including plants and fungi), and the Awesomeness of Nature now have science to help us to quantify them. 
                              -—stay curious! (and hug a tree, literally!)